Dogs of God by Pinckney Benedict

Author:Pinckney Benedict [Benedict, Pinckney]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-79674-5
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-06-08T00:00:00+00:00

They toured the compound. They inspected the defenses on the periphery, the wire, the thick woods that Tannhauser said were already full of punji stakes and steel leghold devices and other booby traps; that, with the arrival of the weapons shipment, would soon be mined with Claymores and studded with tripflares. “Just like a firebase in Nam,” Tannhauser told them. They visited the thick-walled spring-house, its sulfurous waters congealed into a thick jelly, which would serve as the magazine when the Dakota’s explosive cargo had been off-loaded. They saw the armory, with its pitiful collection of antiquated bolt-action Springfields and shotguns, where Yukon moved to stash the rocket launcher. Tannhauser stopped him, saying, “No. That one I’ll have in my quarters with me. The others can go in here, but that one in particular is a special gift from our special friends, so I think I’ll just keep it.” Yukon took up the LAW again.

They ate a quick and unappetizing meal of cold military MREs: ready-to-eat dinners of turkey, spaghetti, chopped steak, sealed in envelopes of thick brown plastic. There was a small square of toilet paper in each meal pouch (Bodo saved his, tucking it into a pocket, while the others discarded theirs; the ground was littered with the thin stuff), along with a treat. Toma got sugarless chewing gum, the pilot some flavored toothpicks; Yukon came up with a small spool of dental floss. They drank bottled water. The cistern, Tannhauser told them, had been inexplicably fouled. It was contaminated, the water undrinkable. The sanitary facilities consisted of a rank, fly-haunted slit trench behind the main building.

The compound’s few inhabitants, when they came across any, moved quickly to get out of the way, eyes fixed on the ground. They resembled the men in Ernesto’s work crew: dark-eyed and dark-complected, underfed, poorly shod and dressed. A stringy dog encountered the group as it trotted out from between two of the cottages. When it saw them, the cur sank to the ground, baring its teeth, its tail curled tightly under its belly. It seemed to be caught between fury and abject fear. Eventually fear won out, and the dog crawled away, cringing, throwing nervous looks at them over its shoulder as it went.

They were not allowed to inspect the marijuana crop that they had come to buy, but Tannhauser described it to them in glowing terms: its prodigious height, the spread of its leaves, its expected potency. Really, he said, just the damn beauty of the stuff. He had a hundred sizable marijuana plots spread throughout the woods surrounding the resort, stretching out in every direction for miles, all artfully camouflaged, assiduously monitored, diligently guarded.

They took in the barracks, the hulls of what had once been a dozen luxurious guest cottages, had once been painted white and surrounded by borders of picket fence. Now the walls were patched with sheets of peeling tarpaper, the genteel porches had collapsed and the wreckage been pulled away. The clapboard walls bulged and gapped. The pickets had been broken and used for firewood.

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