Dog Soldiers

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IT WAS A NICE CROSSING, EXCEPT FOR THE AGENTS aboard. The trade winds were soft and the nights were starry and Hicks found time each morning, while the breakfast rolls and corn muffins were cooling, to do his exercises on the flight deck.

When they tied up at Subic and the liberty sections made for the lights of Olongapo, Hicks stayed aboard to observe the agents. There were three or four, disguised as hippies; they offered joints, giggled, and prowled the rows of dis abled aircraft looking for stashes.

His own first stash had been in the mangled tail section of a Seasprite helicopter but he had moved it after a day, to lie under moldering naval heraldry in a disused flag locker. When they cleared Subic, he moved it again, stuffing the package in a flag bag and immersing it in a marked sack of cornmeal which he had set aside for the purpose. With it, he secreted two pairs of binoculars which he had stolen on the trip out and a Sunday Services pennant for a souvenir.

Each evening, he played chess with Gaylord X in the crew’s lounge. The civilian crew of the Kora Sea observed strict social segregation, so Hicks and Gaylord played in nearly total silence. After each game Gaylord would say, “Ah, thenkew,” and Hicks would reply, “Mah pleasure.” His pleasure was quite genuine for, on this trip, he won every game. There had been one match during which Gaylord had rallied superbly in the end game — but at that point several of his fellow nationalists had sauntered by to kibitz and his counteroffensive collapsed under the strain of rep resenting the race. Gaylord was the second cook, a Black Muslim and a secret Rosicrucian.

After the game, Hicks would brew a pot of verbena tea and turn in early.

He was trying to read Nietzsche again. To his annoyance, he found that he could not get with it at all.

“Whither does it move? Whither do we move?”

“Does not empty space whirl continually about us? Has it not grown colder?”

His copy was from the Seaman’s Service library and the last reader had marked many passages with underlinings and exclamation marks. Hicks smiled when he came to them.

Some punk, he thought. Like I was.

He had read Nietzsche over twelve years before at the Marine Barracks in Yokasuka — Converse’s book — and it had overwhelmed him. He had marked passages in pencil and underlined words that he did not understand so that he could look them up. Before his meeting with Converse in Yokasuka, the only books he had ever finished were The Martian Chronicles and I, the Jury.

Hicks knew very few people for whom he had ever felt anything like love, and Converse — whom he had not seen for twenty hours in the past ten years — was one of them. Seeing Converse again had made him feel good and young again in a simple-minded way; as though all the plans and adolescent fantasies they had shared in the service might take on some kind of renewed near-reality.

Effectively, their friendship had ended when Converse was discharged and Hicks became, as he thought, a lifer. Once while he was still married to his Yokasuka girl, Etsuko, Converse had come to Camp Pendleton without his wife, and the three of them had eaten sushi together. Very rarely they had met to go drinking in the city. But he was aware that Converse for the most part avoided him, and he was rather hurt by the fact.

He was hurt as well by what Mary Microgram had said that Converse had said. And he had been hurt further by Converse’s sneering at his copy of Nietzsche and calling his reading of it piquant — presumably in the sense of appealingly provocative, pleasantly disturbing, rather than spicy, having a pungent odor.

At the same time that Hicks had come to know Converse, he had encountered Japan, and Japan — as he perceived it — had been immensely important to him. He had brought a Japanese woman home with him, and he had come, during his years as a professional marine, to think of himself as a kind of samurai. Although he had never approached satori, he was a student of Zen and he had once had a master, a German who could read the texts and was said to be a roshi. Even dealing, he endeavored to maintain a spiritual life.

In the course of his third hitch, after years of base and embassy duty, of shining shoes and saluting automobiles, he had gone ashore at Danang to face an armed enemy for the first time. His disciplines had served him well.

He had been older than all of them — older than the teen-aged riflemen, older than the Princeton former football player who commanded his company. They expected that he be better and more professional at war than themselves, and he had been. He had never let himself question the necessity to be.

But it was not a war for a man who maintained a spiritual life, and who had taken an Asian wife. Many marines there were stronger against it than he; he declined to speak against war, any war. Yet people in the line who had come to hate the nature of the thing did not hesitate to talk to him about it. When one of the regimental communications companies in the grip of dope spirituality formed itself as a commune and declared for Joan Baez, the kids in it expected a certain sympathy from him.

One day, when the company was out of the line, he had, in a mood of vague disgruntlement, allowed a number of his people to walk into town and see Bob Hope, who was playing there. It was not, in the circumstances, a serious dereliction but it called for reprisal; reprisal came in the

form of an undesirable patrol, which resulted in what Hicks had come to call the Battle of Bob Hope. Almost every man in his platoon who had seen Bob Hope died in it. He himself was shot and flown to Okinawa. At the end of the year his hitch expired and he walked.

It was a source of pride to Hicks that he was at home in the world of objects. He believed that his close and respectful study of Japanese culture had enabled him to manipulate matter in a simple disciplined manner, to move things correctly. He believed it was all in your head.

When, eighteen hours ahead of schedule, the Kora Sea tied up at Oakland, he did his exercises and meditated briefly on the righteous arrow and the inevitability of its union with the target.

Early in the afternoon, the yardbirds trucked Dempsey Dumpsters — huge mobile garbage cans — to the Kora’s after gangway. Hicks waited until the last Dumpster was almost full and then personally conveyed two cardboard barrels of bakery refuse to its maw. The package was inside in its cornmeal sack together with some yeast cartons, the bin oculars and the souvenir flag. Attached to the sack was a length of pennant rigging, which he left adrift within reach of the opening chute. This much done, he returned aboard and took lunch. As he did so, the yardbirds responsible trucked the Dumpsters off to stand with their like in front of the A-dock welding shop. While the-shore-bound sections changed into their shore clothes, Hicks busied himself with a scrupulous cleaning of the bakery.

Shortly after four o’clock, he went on the pier again and bought a bottle of Coke at a geedunk trailer at some distance from the welding shop. At four-fifteen the welders secured and washed their hands. At four-thirty the head cleaning crew signed in and their first stop was the men’s room of the welding shop. They were silent somber blacks; one of them carried the tin refuse can from the toilet to a Dumpster and shoveled the contents into it — paper towels, empty half-pint bottles, cigarette wrappers. At this point, Hicks applied his only tool, which was a key to the welding shop toilet. He had an extensive collection of keys to various buildings and offices at the Army terminal, acquired over a number of years. When the head cleaning crew went round to the other side of the building, Hicks let himself into the toilet and waited until there was no one close at hand. As soon as things appeared suitable, he picked up the tin refuse can and carried it to the mouth of the Dumpster in which his bag was hidden. He held it up against the Dumpster’s chute and with his right hand seized the flag line to pull the package up and shove it into the tin receptacle. He then carried it back to the welding shop toilet, where it would spend the night. There were very few functionaries, however mean, who would stoop to inquire into the maintenance of toilets. Only agents would do so — and although there were plenty of agents about, right thoughts and right actions enabled one to move discreetly. Blacks troubled him most because the sight of a white worker emptying shit cans engaged their attention.

Then Hicks changed clothes, packed his bag, and went to the terminal sick bay to make an early morning appointment for his mandatory chest x ray. He planned to return in the morning with his appointment slip, driving through the gate nearest the sick bay, pick up his package from the trash can before the morning cleaners emptied it, and then drive out through the gate he had entered with the package concealed under a fender.

His normal procedure was to send his dope ashore in the plane parts and recover it from the railroad siding from which the parts were shipped to the repair facilities, but he had heard that the sidings were carefully watched now and the parts sniffed over by dogs. His present plan seemed to him audacious but sound.

The gate search he passed through on his way to the parking lot was thorough and businesslike, worse than he had ever seen it. When it was over, he started his car with difficulty and drove downtown to the Seaman’s YMCA.

At the Y, he engaged a room and lay down on the bed for a while. When it grew dark he was able to discern the peephole in the door through which it was said the military police spied on the military personnel to see if they were buggering each other.

He was restless in the face of dead time. Hours of vacant unease had to be passed before he could return to cop his weight; self-discipline permitted, or required, light uncomplicated diversion.

When he went downstairs he saw that the lights above Oakland had come on, and the sky behind them was like deep blue marble. Even skid row smelled of eucalyptus. He was unmoved.

On a corner two blocks from the Y was a bar called the Golden Gateway. A sign over its side door read: liquor beer food — Home of the Seafarers Club. Another sign made of cardboard, resting against the Venetian blinds in the window, announced Seven Topless Dancers.

At one time the Golden Gateway had sold good cheap Italian food and there were pool tables in the back. The pool tables were gone now and the kitchen with them; in their place was a large cage with pink bars, inside of which girls of various colors and conditions frapped themselves to music from the jukebox. Since the cage was installed, all manner of people fell by. Escaped lunatics up from Agnew came to engage the suburbanites who came to engage rough trade. There were agents representing every agency, and a contingent of neighborhood blacks who did their business there and never seemed to enjoy themselves. Finnish Alex, a bartender under the old regime, managed the place now, assisted by three shark-eyed barmaids.

Hicks went in, thinking he might bullshit with Alex for a while, but it was not much of a place to bullshit anymore. He was shortly drinking hard, following bourbon two-fers with nip bottles of Lucky Lager. The go-go girls were an affront to sex, and Hicks was mildly scandalized by the fact that one of them appeared to be Japanese. The false canine on the upper right side of his mouth began to ache.

Drunk now, he went to the gents’, took the tooth out and ran cold water over it, and rubbed it with a clean handkerchief. It seemed like a good idea. He replaced his tooth, pissed, and went out, walking toward the bar in solemn processional step. A party of blacks watched him from their table like medical students regarding a charity patient with a curious low disease.

At the bar, he got to speak with Alex for the first time.

“I feel like a walking pair of teeth,” he told him.

That means you’re drunk,” Alex said. For Alex, almost everything meant that. “What kind of trip you have?”

“Good,” Hicks said. “A good trip.”

“They still got that good pussy over there?” Hicks leaned his elbows on the bar and belched. “Yeah,” he said. “When you gonna go back?”

“Soon as I can get out. I want to put some money by and take a vacation. Go down to Mexico for a while.”

“Mexico, that’s a good place. They got that good pussy down there.”

Hicks looked up at the girls in the cage.

“What a lot of shit this place is now,” he told Alex. “Why do I have to look at those poor junkies? Christ, I just as soon look at you up there.”

“I ain’t got a costume,” Alex said.

Hicks reached out and pushed him back against the booze locker.

“You got bigger tits, though.”

Alex served him another nip.

“When you say you was goin’ to Mexico?”

“I didn’t say I was.”

“Yes, you did. You just said you was.”

“That’s a dream,” Hicks told him. “A dream.”

“Ever see Coley?”

Coley was a dealer who had also worked for Sea Lift Command and had quit when paranoia overcame him. Hicks swallowed his beer and tapped on the upper tooth with his forefinger.

“Coley?”

“You know Coley,” Alex said. “You used to drink with him here.”

“Oh, yeah,” Hicks said, watching Alex. “Sure. Him.”

“I hear he went to Mexico.”

“Yeah?”

“They say he went down there with a whole lot of money

to buy something for somebody and he blew it all.”

“Blew it all on the jai ‘lai, huh?”

“Blew it all on the good pussy. People are real pissed at him.”

Hicks was about to say that he would be real pissed too if it was his money, but he let it pass. He had never heard Alex talk around dope before.

When the record on the box finished, the girls from the cage climbed down and wrapped some sequined cloth around themselves. One of the girls was a mocha-colored East Indian with the features of a brahmin; she went to sit with a slightly frayed executive type at a back table.

“The guy’s a bug,” Alex said, looking at them. “He ties her up and beats on her. She loves it. They’re both bugs.”

Hicks stood up.

“I don’t want to know all this shit, man,” he said. “I don’t want to know it.” He walked back toward the telephone booth through knots of drinking blacks.

Christ, there’s a lot of them, he thought.

As he walked he tried to maneuver himself in such a way that he would not have to make anyone back up for him, or himself have to back up for anyone. He weaved skillfully among the black customers projecting a genial demeanor, but they seemed only to see the murder in his heart. They were funny folks.

Inside the booth, he secured the door with his foot and thumbed through the phone book. He could not re member deciding to call her. It was just happening.

Etsuko’s second husband was named Eligio Robles, D.D.S. On deciding to leave Hicks she had enrolled in a dental technology course, financing herself by years of petty hoarding. Her English was good enough by then. Dr. Robles was a Filipino, her very first employer.

Humming to himself, he dialed Dr. Robles’ number. And she answered.

“Konibanwa Etsuko? Shitsurayu Mrs. Robles-san.”

“It’s you,” she said.

It seemed to him that he could picture her face exactly as she calmly attempted to determine what the call might mean.

“How’s everything?”

“Fine. How’s everything with you?”

“I just got back from Nam.”

“How was that?” Not that she gave a shit, he thought.

“Fucked up.”

She made no sound, but the line itself seemed to convey her impatience with his profanity.

“How’s the good doc?”

“None of your business.”

“I got some trouble with my teeth. You think he could fix me up?”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“He’s a dentist, ain’t he?”

He took the tooth out again and held it in his handkerchief.

“Ith orful.”

“Why are you stupid?” she said. Cold, ivory anger. “You’re drunk.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s not a funny joke. Don’t bother busy people who aren’t bothering you.”

He decided to ask a stupid question. “Don’t you miss me, Etsuko? I miss you sometimes.”

He could picture her again quite clearly; her mouth would be rippled with a small tremor of embarrassment and faint disgust.

“Give me a chance,” she said. “Stop calling.”

“Christ sakes, I haven’t called you for a year. More than that.”

“When I get calls from you,” she said, “I think you’re becoming a drunken bum. Too bad for a man of your intelligence.”

“Why, you little shit,” Hicks said.

She hung up.

“Interrigence the fuck indeed,” Hicks said aloud. Her English had improved incredibly. “You little shit.”

As he fumbled for another dime, a black girl in an imitation leather overcoat walked by the booth. Hicks smiled at her absently, forgetting that his smile was missing its upper right corner. The girl stared at him and raised her eyes so that the whites were exposed and the irises fluttered under batting lids. Fuck off. As she went by, he blundered into eye contact with the other members of her party — three young men in black leatherette coats and pastel slouch hats. They were not amused.

“Asshole,” he said to himself.

He kept looking back at them as he dialed. When June answered, he turned his back.

“Hello, June.”

“Is that Ray?” She sounded ripped.

“Right,” Hicks said. “I’m down here in Oakland. I’m fucked up and there ain’t a white face in the joint. I want to make my will.”

“Your will?”

“Forget it,” he said. Laughs were hard to come by.

“Owen is here,” June said.

“Owen is here! Terrific. Lemme talk to Owen. I’ll call you tomorrow, O.K.?”

“Uh-uh,” June said. “I don’t want you to call me.”

It was Dumb Question Night.

“Why not?”

“Owen is gonna kill you if he sees you. You know he’s like armed, man. He’s insane with rage.”

Hicks shook his head. Someone tapped on the booth door with a coin. “If he’s insane with rage I won’t trouble him. Can he hear you?”

“He’s out in the garage working over the machine, like I don’t even want him to catch me on the phone.”

“He wouldn’t turn me, would he, June? He wouldn’t narc me over?”

“I don’t think so. Just don’t be around.”

“You asshole,” Hicks said. “You told him. What did you tell him for?”

“Oh, man,” June said. “Who knows why they do the shit they do?”

“The desires of the heart,” Hicks said, “are as crooked as a corkscrew.”

“That’s about how it is,” June said.

He held the receiver, hooked up with the general static. The bloods at the table were broadcasting cocaine vibrations. From his pocket he took the slip of United Seaman’s Service stationery which had Marge’s phone number writ ten on it. When he had done that, he threw a snappy little hand signal to absolutely no one at a point beside the door. One of the bloods turned to check it out.

“Odeon,” the voice said. Hicks smiled. A collegiate whine.

“Marge?”

“Yes?”

“This is Ray.”

“Oh,” she said. “Hi.”

It was nice to be important.

“I’ll fall by early tomorrow. Everything O.K.?”

“Yes. Yes, all right.”

“See you then.”

“See you then.”

He left the phone booth and went quickly out to the street. For a while he walked away from the bay, toward the hills and the lights. In the first block he came to, there were two winos butting shoulders to see which of them could knock the other down. The stopped the game as he came up and approached as though they would panhandle him, but as he passed them they only stood panting and stared.

“I’m the one in the middle,” Hicks told them.

In the next block a camperload of freaks sat eating white bread and bologna sandwiches on the sidewalk beside their vehicle. Hicks paused to watch them eat. One of the boys turned around to glare at him and he was offended. “I’ll fuck every one of you,” he declared.

“Oh, wow” one of the girls said through a mouthful of bread and meat. They turned their backs on him.

“I was only kidding,” Hicks said. “I wouldn’t really.”

In a third block was a bar with playing cards and wheels of fortune painted on the windows. The inside walls were dark blue and decorated with the same symbols but the customers were mainly old men. Whatever arcane scene once informed the place had moved on. Hicks sat down at the bar and continued with his party.

His head was going bad. The painted cards and dark walls oppressed him. Accumulated venom — from Etsuko, Owen, the blacks in the Gateway — was fouling his blood. He did not get drunk very often and sometimes then he did a gulf formed between his own place and the field of folk. His own place was represented by a tattoo he wore on his left arm. It was the Greek word Å’óèëüò; Hicks understood it to mean Those Who Are. When people asked him what it meant he often told them it meant that he was paranoid.

A familiar rage descended on him; it was like a binding in which he could hardly breathe and only blows could loosen it.

He sat drinking, trying to writhe free. For a while he tried to escape by pondering what things he might do with the money, but the money was in the hands of devious fuckups, and he became even angrier.

Just as he was attempting to summon sufficient self-interest to remove himself from the street, a rabbit-mouthed longhair came into the place, chewing on a toothpick, and settled himself a short distance up the bar. It occurred to Hicks that the youth might attach to the old action; he found the kid’s presence and proximity disproportionately offensive.

The youth ordered a beer in a New York accent and drank it with a pill. He dropped his toothpick on the bar. When he saw that Hicks was looking at him, he said:

“What do you say, Cap?” When Hicks did not reply, he flashed him a quick approving downward glance.

The kid was a pogue. It seemed to Hicks that if he got any drunker and his place any lonelier and more savage he might actually have some sort of a shot at him. The prospect, however remote, revolted him.

“You see the fight last night? What a fuckin’ slaughter, right?” The kid advanced a step or so closer. “I tell you the only way you get a nigger to bleed is put a razor in your glove.”

Hicks decided that he was crazy. He was not opposed, in principle, to beating up on crazy people. “I’m from New York,” the kid said. “You been there lately?”

Hicks finished his beer.

“Nobody asked you where you were from. Mind your fucking business.”

“Far out,” the kid said. He did not seem at all discouraged. It was on rails now, Hicks thought. He became impatient for the thing to begin. The kid studied him thoughtfully as though on the point of a decision.

“You’re one mean motherfucker, right?”

Hicks shrugged and stood up, his right shoulder stooped.

“I’m what?”

The kid began talking fast New York.

“I said you were a bad motherfucker, man like you look like you could handle yourself. Like I wouldn’t fuck with you.” He held his hand out with the palm facing Hicks as if to intercept a blow.

“I thought you were.”

“Jesus, Cap, I apologize. I’d buy you a beer and a ball but I ain’t got the bread. This is my last quarter I swear to God.”

“I don’t want your beer, pogue.”

“C’mon. Don’t call me that.”

“I don’t want your beer, pogue.”

“O.K.,” the boy said, “if you’re gonna be like that.”

Hicks had been counting on hitting him. But both he and the boy were aware of how drunk he was, and there was need for caution. The need for caution infuriated Hicks the more.

“I tell you what, Cap,” the kid said after a moment, “you want to help me waste a dude?” Hicks stared at him.

“I got a meet with this faggot. He’s a really loaded dude, man, he’s got like five-hundred-dollar suits. He’s got this jewelry and a Rolex and shit and all these credit cards. You want to take him off?”

The boy moved closer.

“I could do it myself but this dude is like big. If there’s two guys, one guy has a blade — no problem.”

Hicks looked into his eyes. They were nearly sky blue with touches of amphetamine pink at the corners and long dark lashes. When he spoke, he rubbed his jaw with his thumb so that his fingers covered his mouth. He was one of the worst-smelling people Hicks had ever encountered.

“He’s a Jew from television, a big faggot. We show him the blade, man, he’ll shit his pants.”

“You’re putting me on,” Hicks said.

It was almost funny. Maybe it was funny.

The kid took a cigarette from his shirt pocket without removing the pack. He was a museum of yardbird reflexes.

“I swear to God,” the kid said. “You want a piece of this?”

Hicks’ anger was broken. He stared at the kid in wonder.

“With two guys, man — what do you say?”

“Have a beer,” Hicks said.

The youth smiled. When he smiled his upper teeth settled on his lower lip, and he discharged air between them.

If he had smiled a moment sooner Hicks would have cracked his skull. But Hicks had no desire to strike him now. The kid was a whole trip, the whole arcana. You couldn’t just hit such people. They were holy.

“You the one with the blade?” Hicks asked.

The youth looked down at his own leg, and his eyes closed for a moment in sensuous anticipation.

Hicks kicked him in the shin. His foot struck a large object under the trouser cloth.

“What the fuck is that?”

The youth smiled modestly. “A bayonet.”

Hicks laughed and struck the bar with the palm of his hand.

“You’re not a self-respecting person.”

“The fuck I ain’t,” the kid said. “That’s why I got this man, because I’m a self-respecting person.”

“You have a name?”

“Joey,” the kid said. “This girl in Long Island used to call me Broadway Joe because I look a lot like Joe Namath.”

“That’s fine,” Hicks said. “You can just call me Cap. I like it.”

“Groovy,” Joey said. “What it is, I gotta telephone him. He’s set up in this motel over by the marina. I go up first, right? Then I let you in. See, the dude is a lush and we give him time to get mellow. Listen, you sure you’re up for this?”

“Sure,” Hicks said. “I hate the bastards. Give me his phone number. I’m gonna call him and I’ll ask for you. Like I got a message or something for you. You tell me on the phone I should make it another time, but I won’t hear of it. Tell him you’re sorry I have to come up, but you’ll get rid of me in a hurry. Play a role.”

Broadway Joe appeared to think about it. “Yeah,” he said. “O.K.” Hicks copied out the number on an envelope and had another drink while Joey telephoned.

“C’mon, Cap. Let’s go to work.”

“I wait here,” Hicks said. “I call you from here. I got a car. I can be over there in a couple of minutes.”

“No,” Joey said. “Run me over there. You can call from some joint over there.”

“I ain’t using my car for this. You get yourself over there, we put the stuff in his car. Anyway, I don’t want to hang around over there. I don’t like it there.”

“All right,” the kid said. He gave Hicks another smile and poked a finger at his testicles. “I’ll be seein’ you. You ain’t gonna let me down, right?”

“No way,” Hicks said.

When Broadway Joe was gone, Hicks went to the men’s room. In the process of returning to the bar, he was made to realize that it might be extremely difficult to make his way back to the Y. After a while, he got up again and dialed the number on the envelope. There was a firm businesslike hello.

“Hi, there,” Hicks said.

“Who’s this?”

“This is Cap, doll. Your boyfriend Broadway Joe has a bayonet. He’s gonna do you some nastiness with it tonight. He’s on his way right now to fuck you over.”

“Fuck me over?”

“It won’t be as nice as it sounds,” Hicks said.

After a thoughtful interval the man on the phone told Hicks that he was not exactly astonished. “Then there’s you,” the man said. “What’s your story?” Hicks was outraged.

“I’m a nice fella,” he said. “I’m a good citizen. That’s my story.”

“Tell me a little about yourself,” the man said. “Are you big?”

Hicks sighed. He was thoroughly drunk.

“I’m enormous,” he told the man. “I’m this huge motherfucker.”

“I know what would be fun,” the man said. “Turnabout is fair play. Why don’t you come over and we’ll put a little terror in Joey’s young life?”

Hicks hung up and went back to the bar. There was a sign over it he had not noticed before that said:

“That’s pretty good,” Hicks said to the bartender.

The bartender was a yellowing old man; he turned and looked at the sign with disapproval.

“I didn’t put it up. It was here.”

As Hicks went out, the old bartender reached up and took the sign down. There was no point in provoking people.

It was cold outside and the street was dimmed by fog.

“No place for me,” Hicks said.

He walked looking over his shoulder. A few doors down from the bar he caught sight of a city bus coming his way and he forced himself to sprint for the corner. Stepping aboard, it seemed to him that somewhere in the course of his short run he had seen Broadway Joe, in an alley or doorway or up a sidestreet. He was too drunk to be certain.

He stood beside the nervous driver, fumbling for change; by the time he had the money in hand, he realized that the bus had carried him all the way to Jack London Square, within a short walk of the Y. He put the change away, exchanged hostile stares with the driver, and climbed carefully down to the curb.

When he was upstairs in his room, he put a Band-aid over the spy-hole and loaded his thirty-eight with the ammunition he had purchased for it. Before filling all the chambers, he put in a single cartridge and spun the cylinder. He did it three times, and each time the shell came up flush with the barrel. He could not determine whether this was a good or a bad omen.

Waking the next morning, wretched and poisoned, he found the pistol lying on his lamp table among a litter of bullets, cellophane, and pieces of the cartridge box. He was deeply ashamed. It was Uncontrolled Folly.

All through the last hours before daylight, Marge dreamed. At the end of each dream she would be shocked awake by a curious neural explosion, stay conscious long enough to understand that her head ached, then slide

again into sleep. But it was hardly like sleeping at all.

And the dreams, one after another, were bad stuff in deed. Janey teetering on a ledge with a storm-gray New York cityscape behind her, water towers, sooty brick. Something about a mad friar and fruit with blood on it. Something terrible among trees. Each dream incorporated her headache.

Afoot, she was edgy, cramped, accident prone. Coffee burned. A saucer broke. There were two caps of dilaudid left to her but she took some Percodan instead.

She drank the burned coffee as she waited for the Percodan to take. When she felt well enough she read some nursery rhymes to Janey. The nursery-rhyme book had a glossy colored picture of the Old Woman Who Lived in A Shoe; The Old Woman’s many children balanced in the shoe’s eyelets, swung on the laces, swarmed into the margins in bright dirndl skirts and lederhosen. There must have been fifty. Fifty children. Janey wanted to know each one’s name.

“That’s Linda.

“That’s Janey like you.”

Fritz. Sam. Elizabeth.

Marge felt like weeping.

“I don’t know all their names, sweetheart. How could I know all their names?”

“Oh,” Janey said. When the downstairs bell rang, Marge stood up suddenly and the rhyme book dropped to the floor.

“Oh my God,” she said.

Janey stood looking up at her. She stared at the door for a moment and then went to press the buzzer that opened the street door.

“Janey, go ride your horsie for a while.”

Janey’s horsie stood in a fenced-off section of the back yard, a red plastic horse on springs. Sometimes when Janie rode it, she would pass into a kind of trance and bounce for over an hour in an unvarying rhythm with a blankness in her eyes which Marge found alarming. But Janey was not in the mood for horsie riding and she began to pout. Marge could hear a man’s step on the hall stairs.

“Get,” she screamed at Janey. “Get down there.” Janey began to cry.

“Get, get,” Marge shouted, shooing the child away. Janey ran to the top of the steps that led from her bedroom to the yard and stood just outside the door, tear-stained and obstinate. Marge closed the bedroom door. The man outside knocked.

“Yes?” Marge inquired. She stood motionless in the center of the room staring at the closed door.

“It’s Ray,” the man said.

Marge forced herself to open the door to him; he went quickly past her with a glance. He was suntanned and short-haired. He had cold eyes. Janey had insinuated herself back into the living room but when she saw the man she fled, through her bedroom and down the steps to the yard.

Ray set a dun-colored AWOL bag down on the living-room table and went to look out the window.

“I’m not ready for this,” Marge told him.

He looked at her without sympathy.

“What do you mean you’re not ready for this?”

“I haven’t got the money,” she said. Even in her own ears, the whine grated.

“Why, you dumb cooze,” the man said softly.

She was trembling. That morning she had put on a dirty purple sweater and a pair of jeans out of the laundry bag.

She felt soiled and contemptible.

“I mean I haven’t got it here,” she told the man.

He sat down in a wicker chair and rubbed his eyes.

“You got any coffee?”

Marge hastened to the kitchen. She poured the burned coffee she had been drinking into the sink and put on a fresh pot. Ray was pacing the living room.

“I called you, right? How come you don’t have it?”

“I missed the bank. I went to the aquarium.”

When she turned from the stove he was standing in the kitchen doorway with a slim smile.

“You didn’t say anything on the phone about the aquarium. You said you’d be ready.”

“I know,” Marge said. “I really don’t know why. I didn’t want to on the phone. I was going to go to the bank today.”

The man was knitting his brows in mock concentration.

“Somehow I thought you’d come at night.”

“I hope you got off on the fish,” he said. “You’re not getting shit until I get paid.”

“Any way you want to do it.”

He looked her over and she hung back against the louvered kitchen doors, ashamed.

“When are your people coming to pick up?”

“Tomorrow, I think.”

He turned his back on her and walked to the window.

“What do you mean tomorrow, you think? What is this shit?”

“Yes,” she said quickly, “yes it is tomorrow. The twentieth.”

“If I beat up on you and took off your smack I’d be within my rights,” he told her. “You can’t deal with people in this outrageous fucking manner.”

“I’m sorry,” Marge said.

“They get suspicious. They get mad.”

“I understand,” she said.

To her surprise, he smiled again.

“You’re not trying to fuck me over, are you, Marge? You and some people?”

“Well, no” Marge said. “Honestly. It’s just me and John.”

“You and John,” Ray said.

When the coffee boiled, he asked for whiskey to put in it but Marge had nothing in the house except cassis. He poured some over his black coffee.

“I got a hangover,” he explained.

“Me too,” Marge said.

He blew on the coffee.

“You a junkie, Marge?”

Marge tried to smile.

“Jesus,” she said lightly. “Do I look like a junkie?”

“That’s not always a factor.”

“Well, I’m not,” she said.

He stood by the window frowning, listening to the springs of Janey’s horsie in the yard. “What’s that?”

“It’s my daughter’s toy horse.” He nodded and sat down on a cushion, clasping his hands between his knees.

“You’ve seen John?” she asked him.

“Yeah, I’ve seen John. If I hadn’t seen John I wouldn’t be here, right?”

“How is he?”

“Fucked up.”

“Is he really in bad shape?”

“He ain’t in no worse shape than you.” He looked her over again, rather sourly. “You concerned or just curious?”

“Concerned,” she said.

“Who are the people you’re selling to?”

“Friends of friends.”

“You mean you don’t know them?”

“I don’t know people like that,” Marge said. “John set it up. He knows a lot of weird people over in Nam. He’s good at that sort of thing.”

“No, he’s not.”

“I thought he was,” Marge said.

He stood up quickly and went to the window again.

“You’re a mark, Stuff. The people you’re dealing with are gonna know that right away. Unless they’re as unconscious as you are.”

For the first time, she realized that he was afraid.

“This sucks,” he told her.

He had a hungry face; in it Marge detected a morphology she recognized. The bones were strong and the features spare but the lips were large and frequently in motion, twisting, pursed, compressing, being gnawed.

Deprivation — of love, of mother’s milk, of calcium, of God knows what. This one was sunburned, usually they were pale. They always had cold eyes. They hated women.

“Well, what do you suggest?” She looked away from his eyes. “I mean, what do we do now?”

“You pay me,” he said. “I give you the smack.”

“Well, obviously,” she said. “I’ll have to go to the bank.”

“Obviously.”

She was aware that he had moved close to her. He carried the hallucinatory circus scent of patchouli oil, the smell of dope and cold-eyed freakery. She shivered.

“You’re a fuck-up.”

She was almost too frightened of him to be angry.

“Listen,” she said, “we’ll just have to make the best of it”

“What do you think the best of it would be?”

He had reached out and placed his forearm across the back of her thighs; his arm slid upward until his palm was stretched across her buttocks. She was not facing him and he did not turn her toward him, but took one of her breasts in his hand and held it — not caressed but held it — an act of acquisition.

She could not make herself move. Her only act of resistance was to look at him, and what she saw repelled every instinct with which Marge associated her heart. His eyes seemed as flat as a snake’s. There was such coldness, such cruelty in his face that she could not think of him as a man at all. His forward hand released her breast and slid along her belly, the one behind rose gently along the rear seam of her jeans to the small of her back; at first he made no move to kiss her.

When she felt his lips, his bitter greedy mouth against her face, it came to her clearly that it was what she wanted. Suddenly the whole terrifying enterprise had composed itself to incarnation — this man, this scented death’s-head harlequin, with his fingers in her flesh, was embodiment to it all.

There was no power in her. She sought the stale mouth, warmed to the beak across her belly, curled herself in the fear, the danger, the death. The thing itself.

After a few minutes, he stepped back from her. Janey’s horsie creaked relentlessly in the backyard.

“Hot pants,” he said.

She shook her head.

He ran his hand over her rump again, and she shuddered.

“They are.”

“Yes,” she said.

“So you’re what Converse is married to.”

She shrugged.

“Far fucking out.”

He began to seem more like a man to her; out of habit or duty she felt some tenderness.

“We could work this out a little,” he said.

“Yeah,” Marge said, “I’m for that.”

“But we have problems, don’t we?”

“I’m sorry about that. I’ll go to the bank.”

He stared at her for a moment and nodded. “Where is it?”

“A couple of blocks.”

“I’ll drive you,” he said.

She went down to the yard to take Janey off the horse; it was not easily done. In the end she had to hold Janey’s shoulders down to make her stop bouncing.

“We’re going for a ride, Janey.”

She had to say it several times before Janey was aware of her, and in the end she lifted the child from the red plastic saddle. Janey did not complain.

Washing Janey’s face, she saw herself in the bathroom mirror, displaying a wan, fatuous smile. Madness.

She ran a damp towel across Janey’s small face, pasting locks of wet brown hair to the temples. With every second, the thing that had passed between her and the cold-eyed man became more remote and impossible, a fantasy, a delusion. Dilaudid.

When Janey was presentable, they went into the living room; he was gone. She passed into Janey’s bedroom, opened the back door, and saw that he was in the yard try ing to look over the picket fence that separated her patch of lawn from the landlord’s. As soon as she turned back toward the living room, she heard him running up the back steps — and turning again saw him charge through the door at her, straight from her last night’s dreams. His eyes were empty.

Marge’s first impulse was to run toward Janey, but before she could move she found herself flung backward through the living-room door and she did not realize how hard he had struck her until she collided with the living-room table and the warm coffee and cassis ran over her trouser leg.

He stood over her in an animal crouch, staring at the hall doorway. Someone was climbing the hallway steps — a heavy unhurried step.

“Tell them wait a minute,” Hicks said. “Don’t you open that door.”

Still crouching, he ran back into Janey’s bedroom. Just before the door closed behind him, Marge caught sight, over his bent shoulders, of a blond young man in the back doorway. The young man’s arms opened as Hicks ran toward him.

Noises she could not understand came from the bed room — soft scuffling, a few light thumps, what sounded like clothes hangers falling in the closet, finally a low groan.

There was a firm polite knock at the hallway door.

Marge clung to Janey and stared at the blank door in horror. The knock sounded again.

“Just a minute,” Marge said.

The blond young man from the back door stepped into the living room; his nose was running grossly and copiously. Hicks was behind him lifting his shirttails as though he were trying to undress him. The youth knelt down on the floor; Hicks was crouched above him, feeling him up. As if in a magic act, he produced a length of taped chain from the young man’s person. Swinging the chain, he drew himself up — he was pointing at her, mouthing words.

Marge drew back, enfolding Janey in her arms and just as she was shaking her head to indicate her utter confusion, her incomprehension, her inability to cooperate in any manner, the hall door opened silently and a bearded man stood in the doorway. He looked down at Marge in mild surprise.

Instead of coming in, the bearded man took a quick step backward. A whirling gray shape rushed past Marge’s face and something curled itself around the bearded man’s head. Hicks dived for the doorway. He and the bearded man lurched into the apartment, panting.

“O.K., O.K.,” a voice that was not Ray’s was saying. “O.K., for Christ’s sake.” It was the bearded man. Hicks was holding a pistol against his ear.

“I’ll kill you quick,” Hicks told the bearded man. He pulled the chain from around the man’s shoulders and swung it so that it wrapped around his left forearm. The bearded man’s mustache was bloody.

Marge stood up and carried Janey to the bedroom. They were both crying now.

“It’s all right,” Marge said. The terror in Janey’s eyes was so total that Marge could not bear to look at it. “It’s all right, sweetie. You wait on the back steps. Will you? Please, Janey?” Janey went to the back steps, sat on the topmost step and wept.

In the living room, Hicks was repeatedly kicking the blond young man. The bearded man, his hands apparently handcuffed behind him, watched with something like embarrassment.

“I don’t blame you for doing that,” he told Hicks after a while.

“I’m glad you understand,” Hicks said. He left off kicking the youth and started going through the bearded man’s pockets. The first thing he removed was a gold-colored badge set in a shiny plastic wallet. The badge was lettered “Special Investigator.” Hicks looked at it and threw it on the floor.

“I’m a police buff,” the man said.

Hicks regarded him in a way that was not altogether unfriendly.

“I gotta know,” he said. “Was it you I talked to on the phone last night?”

“Let’s not spoil it.”

The blond man was standing up slowly. Hicks walked over to him and clapped him on the back.

“Say hello, Broadway Joe.” He flicked the youth’s hanging shirttail. “Blow your nose.” Suddenly he kicked the youth in the shin. “Where’s your blade today?”

“Fuck you,” Broadway Joe said.

Hicks shrugged.

“You guys are something else. Did you really think I’d lay my good down and go queer-stomping?”

“It has happened,” the bearded man said.

Hicks turned to Marge, who had backed up in the bed room doorway.

“You know these guys?”

Marge shook her head.

“We’re Federal Agents, lady,” the blond kid said. “You’re in plenty of trouble.”

Marge looked at him for only a moment.

“Are they?” she asked Hicks.

“They’re take-off artists,” Hicks said. “That’s who they are.”

The bearded man carried a loaded Walther automatic with a spare clip; Walthers had become the counterculture’s weapon of choice. His pockets contained a billfold with a dozen credit cards in different names, a key ring with a great many keys on it, a Mexican switchblade and chain manacle known to the police as a “come along.” Hicks used it to secure Broadway Joe’s hands to the drainage pipe of the kitchen sink. Broadway Joe’s pockets had only his works — a dropper and a spike, still in its little box, straight from the doctor’s sample bag.

The bearded man, his hands cuffed behind him, was following Hicks about the apartment like a salesman.

“You’re not some asshole,” he told Hicks. “Don’t involve yourself in a disaster.”

Hicks took him by the cuffs and began to pull him back ward toward the bathroom. The man shifted his footing to keep his balance.

“Hicks, listen to me. There’s no deal. It’s just us. Always was.”

Hicks propped him up against the bathroom door and let him talk. The man was smiling as though he were pleased with the elegant simplicity of what he had to say, but slightly impatient with his listener’s obtuseness.

“It was just her and her husband.”

Marge looked at him in wonder.

“Her and her husband, a couple of squares. A couple of idiots for Christ’s sake. Nobody would pay them. Would you?”

Hicks pushed the man against the bathroom door so that it swung open behind him and he landed sprawled against the toilet.

“This is theft,” the man said, standing upright. “You’re gonna pay for this.”

Broadway Joe began shouting from the kitchen.

“You’re fucking A he’s gonna pay for it, man. He’s gonna burn for it.”

Hicks called Marge into the bathroom, gave her the key to the fat man’s handcuffs, and told her to unlock them. He stood in the doorway holding the thirty-eight in his right hand, with his left hand grasping his right wrist.

Marge knelt where she could not see the man’s face and worked the key in the lock until the manacles uncoupled. Hicks sent the man sprawling against the toilet bowl again, slid his pistol across the bathroom tiles toward Marge, and went after him. He forced the man’s arms downward behind the bowl and secured the handcuffs over his wrists below the porcelained pipe that joined it to the wall.

He picked up the handgun and then unbuckled the man’s belt and lowered his trousers so that he appeared to be relieving himself.

“You’re gonna end up in a bag, fool,” the man said.

“If that’s the case,” Hicks said, “I better ice you fellas.”

The man shook his head.

“That wouldn’t help.”

Hicks laughed.

“You think it wouldn’t help, huh?”

“What did you get for this run, Hicks? A few grand? We’ll double it. It’s our smack, for Christ’s sake.”

“Maybe you ought to,” Marge said. Hicks did not look at her. “Maybe you should let them have it,” she said. “It’s not worth it.”

“This is an intelligent young lady,” the man on the toilet bowl said. He stared at Marge in a sort of passion; his brown eyes were moist. “Hicks, you hear what she says? She doesn’t want to die.”

Hicks walked out of the bathroom. In a moment, Marge followed.

“Listen,” the man on the toilet bowl called. “She wants to hand it over. He won’t let her.”

“You stupid cocksucker,” Broadway Joe called from the kitchen. “You know what you’re gonna get?”

Hicks walked into the kitchen, bent over Broadway Joe, and clubbed him twice across the face with the butt of the thirty-eight.

“You’re not gettin’ any cherry,” Broadway Joe said softly, and fainted.

“I just can’t leave him alone,” Hicks said. “I love him.”

They went into the bedroom and closed the door.

“Let’s give it to them,” Marge said tearfully. “I’ll take the loss. I’ll pay you anyway.”

“Take all your letters,” Hicks told her. “Take anything that can indicate where you might go. Don’t forget anything.” He touched her arm. “And make it quick.”

“Let’s give it to them.” Marge said.

“They’re not as reasonable as you. They’ll kill us any way.”

He went back into the living room and stood by the window. “Hurry up, Marge.”

Marge took up a leather portfolio and began shoving things into it.

Letters from Converse, lists of toll telephone calls, whatever came to mind and hand. She was not really concentrating well. Janey had come back up the back steps and was watching her through the glass doors.

When she had taken everything she could think of, she went into the living room for a quick last look and quite suddenly began to gag. It took her a moment and a few deep breaths to stop.

“I’m sorry,” she told Hicks.

“You’re not ready for this,” Hicks said.

She went back to the bedroom, let Janey inside, and led her by the hand past the open bathroom door. She kept herself between Janey and the doorway but Janey peeked round her and saw the bearded man on the toilet.

“Kiss your ass goodbye, cunt,” the bearded man said.

Marge did not look at him.

Hicks put the taped chain and the pistols he had acquired into his AWOL bag and led them into the hallway. They went down the two flights slowly, Marge pushing Janey before her. When Hicks opened the street door, the sunlight bathing the white and pastel buildings of the block made the world seem abnormally bright.

He stood for a moment peering outside.

“Where’s your car?” he asked her.

“Beside the house. On the left.”

“Get in it and start it up.”

Marge led Janey to the car and turned the key. When the engine turned over, he came quickly down the front steps and climbed in beside them. They pulled out of the driveway and turned left toward the Bay.

“To the bank,” Hicks said.