But I couldn’t stop longing … for She-Dog … my childhood sister, Little White She-Dog. I wondered about her promise … of a sister, what sign would she give me and when … and if so, then it all has meaning … while our women argued in the kitchen, we sat and dreamed … bottles of Firewater on the desks, weapons close at hand … outside our windows the battle raged … we were brutes and terrific boys, thieves and entrepreneurs, drunks and junkies, artistes and wheeler-dealers … low-down and dependable … and above all we were a community, don’t forget, there was a war raging outside our windows … and this was before we knew what would happen … and we were ferocious and meek and ferocious and meek and ferocious and meek … and we were fetishists and sexists and superstitious, the power of water and fire were in the air … and there was a time for prayer and a time for song … a time to get your ass kicked and a time to kick butt … and from time to time we’d just sit back and dream, in the community but by ourselves … Bohler told us we were miles Christi … but we were actually more like Dog Soldiers* … it was the time after the explosion and we lived in the ruins … robots thundered through the air … and time went by … because time is always running.
Slovak meanwhile got Bohler completely. Olovrant, yeah, how bout that, he said, stroking his rosary with the massive lead beads touched by the Papa himself after Bohler went on his knees all the way to Roma the great … founded by those two Gypsies that sucked at their she-hound, that She-Dog of theirs … but no one was interested in that except me.
Maybe the reason Bohler went was because of what happened to him in the slammer … because of what that gang did to him … Hey, how bout that, said Bohler, fingering the string, this is an olovrant too. It was a peaceful evening, one of the few when we weren’t either in the city or out at the Rock.
5
THE VOICE. AT THE ROCK AND AROUND THE COUNTRYSIDE. I’M RUN-DOWN. THE THINGS OF THE BOX.
You see … back in the Stone Age of the Organization we would drive out to the Rock to celebrate every m. earned, rustled up, or extorted, but not anymore … we would’ve celebrated ourselves to death … now we went out there to switch off. Prague was the place of byznys … this was before the thing with the mill, before what happened to David … the Rock was our mystical sanctuary, our castle. It was a house that belonged to Micka, the property we’d used as collateral for our first loan from Early Bird Megabank … back in the ’70s Micka had lived there with a bunch of hippies who attempted to stave off the miserable world around them by erecting a fortress out of their time, to bring it to a standstill. The cops dragged them out one by one, like rabbits from a hutch, and most of the boys and girls wound up emigrating. The first time we went, we had to empty the closets of old hippie bells and ponchos and sugar wafers and poems and headbands and records and flutes and lutes, moldy weed and moldy shrooms, and Micka grinned happily as he burned the things of the old time … the past, but suddenly Bohler leapt into the flames and plucked out a Yanis Yoplin album, and that was the first time he said: Thou shalt not blaspheme … unnecessarily … she knew Fiery Jack an all sortsa human tricks … till the dog from hell got her … she had a strong voice.
And as Bohler spoke, I heard a woman’s voice, a throaty song, like a green flash of light … coming to me from the distant mountains, and in spite of its power and energy it was twisted … and full of longing … maybe trying to show me the way, I thought. What is it? Who is it?
And then, oddly, my heart brimmed with She-Dog’s now quite old but not entirely forgotten words. They were soft and peaceful and filled my body’s nerves with tenderness. She said to wait. She said to be ready. And again she let me hear the voice.
Lemme see you! I cried, unfortunately aloud, and everyone looked at me funny, amid the general and joyful destruction of the dead packs’ cult relics I suppose I appeared somewhat sentimental … and the power I had felt from She-Dog’s hidden presence drained out of me so fast and, it seemed, irrevocably that I tried to chew my way down into the dirt and stay there.
Switching off out at the Rock meant … shrooms and weed and LSD and Firewater and liters of red wine and not talking much and trying to just be … now and then we’d bring along various pseudodrooginas, various close female friends … no conceited rant-and-ravers, no dumb yapping cunts … it was nice to be able to dream a while … that one of them was my sister … I took Cepková once … hoping, I guess, to see in her face a flicker of She-Dog’s … just one more time … but it didn’t come, not even when I stopped talking and concentrated hard … she was just another blonde … but at least she was from our old troupe, so we played around a little … put on a little makeup and put on a little show … around the barn, past the gate, and back again … in the wind … and at first we’d be a little uneasy without any bad new ads crowding our ears and eyes … instead of Barbie, just wicked old Slavic Polednice* occasionally appearing on the sunstruck hillside across the way … no toyfils flying around, just an occasional wicked old werewolf roaming the nearby forests, but they knew to stay away from the house or we’d’ve busted those bloody chops a theirs … just a good old Goblin or two calling out in the woods now and then, no copters circling overhead, like during the ancient gothic Orwelliad … Bohler brought the Gobs food … but I’m sure the old werewolves ate it all anyway … and when from time to time we got an uncontrollable craving for those disgusting rubber city burgers, we’d drown it out with red wine and Firewater and go to the pantry for more shrooms, and then it was enough to sit at the edge of the frozen lake throwing stones onto the ice … and in the crack of the ice you could hear life’s blows, like slow music … with the certainty that come summer the stones would make circles and that every plop they made would send a greeting to your power.
Micka got the idea for us to exercise now and again, on some of those freezing mornings. Sharky wanted to see if he could stay on his feet in the air, David was almost in favor, and it was all the same to Bohler, I was the only one that refused … mornings I’m usually useless after a long hard night of dancing, I get plenty of motion as is, so I watched from indoors, basking in the cheery morning glow of my half-naked pseudodrooginas, including Lady Laos, while those madmen, my pals and partners, hopped around, doing push-ups and sit-ups and sparring with each other …
That’s what makes the un-Christian computer samurai so cool, Micka lectured us, they go by a contract too, Bushido’s what they call it, they travel in clans an teach their scamps to fight at an early age, the coolest way’s with bamboo swords, alias kendo, Micka the lawyer explained. Damn straight: healthy body, healthy mind.