‘Got an outlaw soul, like mine,’ said Gus. It sounded like he’d said this with pleasure more than a few times before.
The big guy carried some old prison muscle, some once-serious fuck-you muscle that now sagged with fatty layering. He had shoulders that would fill a doorway and a garrulous deep-throated cigarette voice, and the long-suffering face of a sinful Santa Claus who might have spent his best years in a maximum-security prison. A hand-rolled cigarette slanted from the gash in his nicotine-yellow beard, the smoke dribbling upward into the climbing curtains of gray fume made by the men up and down the bar. There was so much smoke around him that for a moment I thought of a corpulent, disheveled djinn that had just slipped from its lantern to perch on this undersized stool.
When the smoke purled away from his face, leaving momentary fissures through which I could glimpse his broad, flat features, I noticed the pair of square glasses that hung slightly crooked, from a missing nose-guard on the left side. He wore a Taco Bell giveaway T-shirt with a picture of a chihuahua on it, the sleeves scissored off high so that you could see the unbroken mural of tattoos running from the top of each shoulder down to the backs of his hands. The usual ex-con shit: snakes, screaming skulls, naked sluts, patriotic eagles, bleeding Christ, Satan, Confederate stars and bars, Indian stuff, mythic heroes, Chinese characters. The right tricep said: ‘PLAY IT LOUD,’ ‘HARDSCRABBLE MAN,’ and ‘HARDLUCK BASTARD,’ while a forearm that said: ‘JOHN 3:16’ (a prop, I guessed, to impress some parole board), ‘13½’ (meaning: 12 jurors, one judge, and one-half of a chance), and ‘ONE PERCENTER’ (denoting proud membership in society’s worst 1 percent). The left arm said: ‘POW/MIA,’ ‘VFW,’ and ‘173rd’ and had a bunch of other military emblems. Some of the ink seemed new and bright. As with a lot of guys who go in for tats, his skin was a schizoid mess, like a cave decorated with the iconography of one tribe and then scrawled over with the totems of its enemies. The arms themselves were cable-thick, but lacking any noticeable muscle-tone, and the Bud longneck he nursed looked tiny in the lumpy mitt of his hand. His fingernails were a half-inch long and scummed with dirt.
Enormous twin jets of smoke spilled from his nostrils as he stroked his dog and said: ‘There’s pieces of state troopers in his colon.’
Scars crossed the dog’s coarse-haired body, a map of lots of bad road traveled. The tip of the dog’s left ear was missing, as if chewed off, and drool hung in a constant strand from his mawful of rotten teeth. He refused to eat much besides tacos and burritos, the stranger explained, and he frequently shat himself. Clouded with cataracts, the dog’s eyes nevertheless seemed weirdly alert. Sal, always uncomfortable around dogs (a chow once lunged for his testicles), seemed especially wary around Jesse James; I could hear the click-click-click of his Bic.
‘This old boy has special senses,’ Gus said, his pale gray eyes following us through his crooked glasses. ‘Even more’n other dogs, who all got them. Anyone who knows shit about dogs knows this. Jesse James can smell cops from a couple miles away. Some kinda mutant thing. Don’t ask me how, but he picks up pig-whiff on the wind. He starts that real deep growling down in his guts, a minute later a black and white cruises by. Anyone means me harm, he knows before I do. This time in Phoenix? I’m breaking break with a hobo. Nice enough hobo, no clue he might be queer. My guard’s down. And old Jesse starts that growling . . .’
Through Gus’s closed mouth, the growl came, remarkably doglike, murderously threatening. ‘His hand’s gone into his pocket, and I ain’t even noticed. “What the hell is it, old boy? What the hell?” And then Jesse’s just a blur going for the dude’s hand, and you know what’s coming outta that pocket while Jesse’s teeth are sinking in? A fish-boning knife. A hobo after Gus Miller’s tender cornhole itself. Evil’s in a man’s sweat, it lives there, Jesse smells it oozing outta you. Old boy’s peepers ain’t so terrific anymore, but he’s got other senses. Like those blind old masters on Kung Fu Theater who can snag arrows out of the air based on the vibrations, whooshwhooshwhoosh!’
‘I’ve heard dogs smell, like, ten thousand times what we do,’ Telly said.
‘More like fifty,’ Gus said. ‘And that’s a normal dog. Mine’s twice, three times that. You’re an open book to Jesse James.’
The dog was angling his snout into Larry Swet’s buttocks. Old Larry stared with his blasted face, twisting his body to monitor the dog’s progress into his prostate, too frightened to touch the dog with his frozen, outstretched palm.
‘Well now, old boy,’ Gus said. ‘I don’t think it’s that kinda bar.’
‘Why’s he doing that?’ Sal said, his lighter going click-click-click.
‘Says he smells a cop,’ Gus said. ‘Got any LAPD in there, friend?’
Gus tugged his dog away, then gave terror-pallid Larry a rough, good-natured thwack on the back. A smile cracked through the stranger’s beard, showing chipped yellow teeth. Old Larry looked uncertain for a moment, then his shriveled cheeks filled with color and his toothless old gums hung wide open. He couldn’t stop smiling, glowing with sweet relief, making a sound like ‘Ugmadaawg mugga.’
‘To a dog, see, a bunghole’s like a signature,’ expounded Gus, a professor now, the bar freaks hushing like delegates at a UN forum, ‘or a fingerprint or a snowflake. No two exactly alike. A dog’s more intelligent than a human being. It’s ancient tribal dog-wisdom. Your glands tell a dog what you’re made of. A man, on the other hand, shit: he’s stupid and easily betrayed. He’ll believe another man’s words, or his eyes, and before he knows it there’s a shiv in his fucking ribs.’
As he stood to lift the dog onto his lap, stretching himself to his full height, I perceived Gus’s enormous – and enormously uneven – dimensions. In his leather military shit-kickers he stood a few inches over six feet tall, with a sagging barrel chest and a gut like a heavyweight’s medicine ball. He gave the impression of being able to consume entire chicken coops, if not chicken farms, and of the capacity to shit really unreasonable quantities – avalanches, Pompeii-drowning cataracts of shit. Propping up all this weight were a pair of small, overtaxed legs. A big, square Dumpster of an upper half attached to a set of wobbly Q-tips down below. His Yankees cap, which he wore with a sharp peak, was a cheap bootleg knockoff of Major League Baseball-licensed merchandise. He’d sweated through the cap’s gray cloth so that it was permanently black in a rim around the crown. Crumbs of what might have been pretzel or peanut infested several strata of his big yellow beard, which started high on his cheekbones and hung shaggily over his throat.
‘It’s Jesse’s Apache and Blackfoot ancestors,’ Gus said, elaborating on the dog’s powers. ‘He’s bred from a race of proud warrior-dogs that ate the white man and the white man’s soft yogurt-eating dogs for breakfast.’
‘I thought you said he’s from Canada,’ Sal said.
‘On his mamma’s side, brother,’ Gus said. ‘Daddy’s side’s pure Apache and Blackfoot from way back. Ain’t you listening?’
‘The big guy’s right,’ I said. ‘Some dogs are telepathic over short distances. There’re studies on it.’ Inventing one on the spot, I added: ‘Conway-Kane, University of Minnesota, 1992.’
‘Matter of fact,’ Gus said with a slow nod, ‘they wanted Jesse James for that one. I said, “Over my fat dead carcass am I gonna let you poke him and electrode him, you government maggots.”’
Muscles twitched in Old Larry’s leathery cheek and his shrunken fist slammed the bar top. ‘Mufukkin gummint!’ he cried.
‘CIA gets their hands on him, what do you think they’d do? Exploit him as a weapon of war, same as they did me,’ Gus said. ‘An assassin of indigenous populations. I’ve worked for the government – shit I can’t really talk about – and I know how their thinking runs. I’ve been there! Covert missions! Lookit this!’ He pointed to a tattoo on his meat-slab forearm, nestled between a Satanic biker slut and a pair of dice. In bold square letters, it read, ‘BLACK OPS.’
‘What does this tell you?’ he said. ‘It tells you I’ve been ther
e.’
Gus had taken my fictional Minnesota study and given himself a personal encounter with it. I waited for a wink from him, a smirk, something that said we were pulling a little harmless jabberwocky on the rest of them. When none came, I began to wonder whether he believed there was such a study. Was he insane?
‘Hey,’ Telly said, ‘they’re throwing hands over there.’
Two large, drunk men with stupid hair – a mullet, a rat-tail – were taking wild, grunting swipes at each other over the pool table. Then they picked up pool sticks and began to have a sword-fight. ‘Come on, bitch!’ one cried. ‘Bring it, bitch!’ cried the other. ‘Step up, bitch!’ shouted the first. Soon it became a ham-fisted wrestling match, the two of them tumbling sideways onto the pool table and holding each other in a furious, panting, spittle-streaked clench. Bets were placed on the outcome.
It wasn’t until a pool ball came flying over the counter and into the mirror that Little Junior decided to stop it. The jockey-sized barkeep was too cheap to hire a bouncer and forever picking up drubbings as a result. The combatants stood there with their stupid hair mussed, snarling, winded, and red-faced, while he ordered them out.
Each man had 70 or 80 pounds of muscle on Little Junior. They were offended that he had interrupted their fun.
‘Couple friends can’t mix it up a little bit?’ panted Rathead, wiping a string of his friend’s saliva from his forehead. ‘Who laid down that law?’
‘My bar’s blue-collar, not white trash,’ Junior said. ‘Jerry Springer’s waiting for you on the sidewalk with a contract.’
‘Your voice is funny,’ Mullet told Junior. ‘What are you?’
‘I’m American,’ Junior said defensively.
‘He ain’t,’ Mullet said. ‘I can hear it in his throat. I can’t pretend I didn’t. And I won’t.’
‘This is Orange County, California,’ Rathead said.
‘If it was riverdance night,’ Mullet said, ‘the sign should say, “Riverdance Night.”’
‘He’s Australian, like the Crocodile Hunter!’ Sal shouted. ‘But he’s American.’
‘This,’ Junior said firmly, ‘is John Wayne, Jesus Christ-country. The Duke used to drink here.’
‘The Duke was a draft-dodger,’ Mullet said. ‘Plus a queen. Why do you think he walked that way?’
Junior looked furious, uncertain. ‘Riding horses,’ he said.
‘He hated horses,’ Mullet said. ‘He had to remind himself to say “ain’t.”’
‘You’re a goddamn liar,’ Junior said.
‘It was the gay rights crowd,’ Mullet said, ‘that got that airport in Irvine named after him. I can show you the article.’
‘I’ll show you the fuckin’ curb!’ Junior screamed.
There are little guys who seem a lot bigger than they are, when they climb up on their bluster. And there are little guys who seem exactly the same size, no matter how much they scream, and only embolden enemies when they do it. Junior was the second kind of little guy.
An unfortunate thing happened to him then, the same unfortunate thing that always seemed to happen when he tried to exert physical force on those larger than himself, which is everybody larger than a jockey. He got his ass kicked. You hoped there’d be patrons to step in to stop this from happening, considering how Junior was a much-loved neighborhood treasure who cashed social security checks to keep people in drinking money and sold Durals for a quarter a smoke. Shame for a man to put his life into a bar only to get his ass kicked in it all the time.
Everyone knew Junior’s story. How he inherited the bar from his dad, Dick Dorsey Sr., who was famous for his fistwork. How the old man was an Army boxer and Vietnam vet who looked runty and harmless behind thick Buddy Holly glasses, but could aim his uppercut like a scoped rifle. How he deployed that rifle fist on any man who even vaguely disrespected his bar, but might feed the same man free drinks till the ambulance came, toss him a loan, or let him crash in the janitor’s closet. That was old Dorsey, right next to the Duke, in a photo behind the counter, grinning in his Army beret and dress greens and thick glasses. When oldsters told stories of his dad, as they often did – of his violence and generosity and deceptive runtiness – Junior’s face got this far-away look. His posture straightened with pride a little, and he had to turn away to hide the mist in his eyes.
But no matter how much he tried to emulate his lost dead pop, the barkeep succeeded only in emulating those World Wrestling patsies in plain tights with names like John Johnson or Don Smith who served as whipping posts for the spectacularly caped-and-monikered steroidal greats.
Tonight all of us just watched as poor Junior once more martyred his little body on the rack of filial longing. Rathead hoisted him by the crotch over his head (Junior’s sneering, startled face suspended there at a humiliating angle) and body-slammed him on the pool table, producing an ugly thumping sound and a collective ‘Oooof!’ throughout the room. Junior lay there writhing like a pinned bug, grimacing with impotent hatred at the Budweiser lamp swinging above him.
You hated to see a thing like that, really. And nobody doing a thing, just a lot of people shaking their heads and saying, ‘Poor Junior.’
Except Gus Miller. There was a terrific rush of wind as he sprang off his stool, those undersized legs trucking him along with surprising swiftness. If Mullet even caught a glimpse of the big shape rushing toward him, he had no time to react before a pair of fat tattooed arms were tightening like pythons around his neck from behind. His mouth sagged; his eyes flickered up in his skull; he sagged to the sawdust.
Rathead gaped, retreating against a wall. He smashed a Michelob Lite against a chair and waved three inches of jagged-edged bottle. ‘Git away! Git away, fatguts!’
‘I did two tours in Nam and served the devil himself,’ Gus growled. ‘My kill-count’s thirty-two men, fifteen women and eight children. Maybe tonight I improve my stats.’
‘Don’t think I won’t cut open those guts!’
Gus’s tone was matter-of-fact, humorous, and terrible. ‘I will take that bottle from your hand. I will gouge your eyes out with it. I will fuck your sightless skull with my fifty-four-year-old joint. I will fire jizz into your cranium. I will feed your liver to my dog. Then I will cut off your head and hang it from my rearview mirror as a souvenir.’
Rathead’s lip began trembling pathetically. ‘Live and let live, okay, brother? Let it be, alright?’
‘You havin’ a John Lennon moment?’ Gus said. ‘I’m more a Stones man myself. “Let it bleed” is better than “Let it be,” don’t you think? Let it bleed! Let it bleed! Let it bleed!’
Rathead dropped the bottle and bolted, leaving his friend unconscious on the floor.
‘Battlefield desertion,’ Gus said. ‘People just don’t understand a goddamn thing about friendship anymore.’
Grunting and cursing, Junior climbed off the pool table and kicked the sprawled-out Mullet two or three times in the guts. A few regulars dragged the man by the ankles onto the sidewalk.
Junior limped behind the bar and pounded back three drinks. He told Gus Miller he could drink free all night, and Gus, leaning his elbows on the bar, smiled and said, ‘Much obliged. I’ll take Bud.’
‘What about us?’ Sal asked.
‘I didn’t see anyone else do shit,’ Junior said.
‘After what they said about the Duke,’ Telly told them, ‘I was pretty close to fucking them up.’
‘Every man is alone in this world, even in his own bar,’ Junior said.
‘I’m hearing some God’s honest truth now,’ Gus said.
‘You showed some heart and hustle out there,’ Sal said. ‘We love you, Junior. We wouldn’t let anything bad happen.’
‘Fuck you,’ Junior replied. ‘And I’m from New Zealand, asshole. Don’t ever call me an Australian again.’
Junior came over and stood in front of me wearing a foul, troubled expression. ‘You know history, right?’ he asked hesitantly. ‘That true about the Duke liking other cow
boys?’
‘That was an ugly lie,’ I said. ‘But it was true about horses. He hated ’em. And it was true about “ain’t.” He didn’t like to say it. I’m sorry.’
‘What about draft-dodging?’
‘That’s true too,’ I said.
‘Liberal media horseshit,’ Telly said. ‘Duke was a great American. He never ran from nothing. Remember that part in The Searchers where he shoots out the dead Indian’s eyes so he’ll wander blind between the winds forever? I mean, just to be a cold motherfucker?’
‘Maybe my favorite flick,’ Gus said. ‘Where he says, “What the Red Man don’t understand is, there are some critters that just keep comin’ – and I’m one of ’em.” Gives me wood, religiously.’
Junior opened a Bud longneck and stood it in front of Gus. ‘I’m grateful for the hand, and I mean no disrespect,’ Junior told him, ‘but you’re kind of a scary piece of work.’
‘Terrorizing shitbirds gets my nuts off,’ Gus said. ‘Trouble with a rumpus at fifty-four, you pay for it later. A body don’t bounce back. Not when you got arthritis, gout, a gimpy spine, and a bad ticker, and I ain’t even gonna tell you about my liver, much less the horror-movie runnin’ in my brain . . .’ Stroking his dog, he added: ‘Hate to see my favorite drinking establishment dissed that way.’
‘I’ve never seen you in here before,’ Junior said.
‘Been thirty-odd years,’ Gus said. ‘Back when Dorsey ran it. Giant of a man, Dorsey. When the pintsized bastard was standing on his guts, that is.’
‘You knew him?’
‘Brothers in Special Ops,’ Gus said. ‘I sucked a pit viper’s venom from his thigh in Da Nang. Men go through a thing like that together, well . . .’ He held aloft two meaty, entwined fingers. ‘That’s the kind of friendship most never know.’
Junior’s face filled with questions and a kind of nervous pride. ‘That’s my pops you’re talking about,’ he said quietly.
From Gus: a surprised smile. ‘Hell, you’re Junior? The one whose mama took him overseas? Your pops talked about you all the time.’
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