Dog Soldiers (13 page)

“
You would shit, wouldn
’
t you?
”
she said to him.

She stayed in the chair surrounded by immensities of silent time. At the core of it, within her, a righteous satisfaction was rising. She sensed the outer world as an infinite series of windowed rooms and she felt a clear confidence that it contained nothing which she could not overcome to her satisfaction.

It was very unlike Marge to sit so long without fidgeting, even when she was alone. There was a noise in the street outside and although she could not identify it, she used it as a handle and made herself stand up. Upright, she was weary but unafraid. Not since she was much younger had she felt so satisfying a commitment as she felt to the caper and to the dope that would be on the water. High, she was party to it, in communion.

“
All right,
”
she said. It was all right.

When she saw herself in the mirror, she smiled and raised a hand to her mouth. She adv
anced on herself cau
tiously but with dignity, turning round before her turning image. When she examined her eyes she saw that the pupils were tiny and surrounded by what seemed enormous areas of gray.

Dilated. Dilaudid. Praise dilaudid.

“
We are not afraid today,
”
she said. Old song.

Us against them, she thought. Me against them. Not unlike sexual desire. The quickening of that sense brought her into other rooms and she flashed the mooches
’
fingers laboring over their damp half-erections, burrowing in the moldy subsoil of their trousers like arachnids on a decom posing log.

It made her laugh and shudder.

On the redwood table nearby there was a letter from him but she kept her hands away from it. He would be in Saigon, twelve hours removed — certainly alive somehow, probably afraid.

When she thought about him, she often wondered if there was a proper way to
punish him for being there with
out her, or instead of her. But she felt at peace with him
now.

She closed on the mirror and looked in her own eyes again.

Diluted.

When she felt herself leaning backward she turned and partly sat on the edge of the table where his letter was; she could see herself in profile now, her body bent at the but tocks which the last mooch had been so concerned to see.

“
Your ass is on the line,
”
Marge told herself aloud.

And it did seem to her that she looked vulnerable.

Deluded. Dilaudid.

She straightened up
and walked from one light to an
other, turning them out. When the room was darkened she was aware of a glow from the street. It seemed the wind had stopped, and going to the window she saw that the street was hushed with fog and the street lights ringed with rainbows. It was all fine.

In the bedroom she passed Janey
’
s crib and heard the troubled breathing. Vulnerable.

But it
’
s righteous, she thought.

She straightened the child
’
s blankets and undressed with pleasure. Lying in bed, she thought of him without want ing to hurt him at all. Us against them would be best.

And when she closed her eyes it was wonderful. She passed into a part of the sea where there was infinite space, where she could breathe and swim without effort through limitless vaults. She fancied that she could hear voices, and that the voices might belong to creatures like herself.

I
t was a nice crossing, except for the agents
aboard. The trade winds were soft and the nights were starry and Hicks found tim
e each morning, while the break
fast 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
K
o
ra 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,
“
M
ah
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 rea
d Nietzsche again. To his annoy
ance, 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 sa
murai. Although he had never ap
proached 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 foot
ball player who commanded his company. They expected that he be better and more professional at war tha
n them
selves, 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 f
or Joan Baez, the kids in it ex
pected 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 beli
eved that his close and respect
ful study of Japanese cu
lture had enabled him to manipu
late 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 al
most 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 respon
sible 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 him
self with a scrupulous cleaning of the bakery.

Shortly after four o
’
clock, he went on the pier again and bought a bottle of Coke a
t a geedunk trailer at some dis
tance 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 him
self 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 recep
tacle. He then carried it back to the welding shop toilet, where it would spend the
night. There were very few func
tionaries, 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 emp
tying shit cans engaged their attention.

Then Hicks changed clothes, packed his bag, and went to the terminal sick bay t
o make an early morning appoint
ment 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.