The shot glass Junior had been toweling off hung limply at his side. ‘What was he like?’ he asked. ‘I never – never met him, you know. But he’s big in my heart and he’s why I’m here.’
‘A crazy, two-fisted, play-by-his-own-rules sonofabitch,’ Gus said. ‘’Course, the Latin brothers called him “mojon,” which means “little turd,” but they always said it with respect. We did things in that jungle – – ’ He grimaced into the corners of the room, as if recalling something unmentionable. ‘Well, maybe some scabs are better left unpicked.’
‘Did he kill a lot of gooks?’
‘He did his share.’
‘That’s my pops,’ Junior said with emotion.
Gus opened his wallet and put half of an old, torn dollar bill in front of Junior.
‘He gave me this, last I saw him,’ Gus said. ‘Anytime I was down on my luck, he said this buck’d buy me some friendship.’
From a drawer under the register Junior took a small wooden curio box where he kept items of sentimental value left by his dad. He removed half of a dollar bill. Its torn diagonal edge matched perfectly with the half produced by Gus. There was writing on the bill. Assembled, it read: ‘Dick to Gus: eternal IOU for my ass.’
‘Well,’ Junior said, ‘if my daddy gave you this, you bet it’s redeemable here.’
‘Who are you, big guy?’ Telly said. ‘We been here all night and don’t know your name. I’m Telly. Mexicans call me Chupacabra.’
‘Gus,’ he said. ‘People used to call me Mad Dog, but I like plain Gus these days.’
‘Mad Dog Miller?’ Sal asked. ‘The Mad Dog Miller?’
‘Only one of me,’ he said. ‘The world never thought to kick around two men that way. World doesn’t have a foot big enough.’
We all sat in silence for a moment, digesting that. Junior just stood there with his hands at his sides. Sal worked up the guts to say, ‘People said you could tell Mad Dog Miller by his horrific scars.’
Gus turned his big head toward Sal, glaring. ‘You take me for some kind of sideshow freak?’
Sal’s hand wormed its way into his pocket and came out with the Bic: click-click-click-click – –
‘Fuck it,’ Gus said, slowly standing and peeling his T-shirt up off his enormous belly, up over his sagging man-tits. Someone said: ‘Damn.’ Another said: ‘Holy Christ.’
The whole abdomen crawled with gashes and puncture-wounds and stitch-marks, like the surface of a butcher block. He pulled down his shirt and returned to his beer, saying, ‘Horrific enough for your taste?’
‘How’d you get ’em?’ Telly said.
‘Central Highlands, ’69,’ Gus said. ‘Gut-first plunge into a pungi-staked Cong trap. Nearly bled to death, impaled in that godforsaken pit like some kind of hog. Grace of God, monsoons had partially collapsed the trap so I could claw my way out. Found the carcass of a monkey, choked down the rotten flesh to stave off starvation. The maggots? I made a friend of ’em, used ’em to suck out the poison. Finally – this is after three days in the jungle – some American soldiers find me. Come to find out, nobody’s been looking for me. My commanders wanted me to disappear. Only two, three people in the military command structure knew the nature of my mission.’
‘What sorta mission?’ Telly asked.
‘Your basic wetworks-type covert shit,’ Gus said. ‘Assassinations of foreign dignitaries sympathetic to the enemy, with extreme prejudice. You might’ve heard that phrase in the movies? Actual code. Bona fide. Not supposed to make it back alive. And then I was too dangerous to keep around, so that was the end of my paid vacation in Southeast Asia. Diagnosed Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, friends: a skullful of fucking demons, screaming monkeys and Napalmed children. Not to mention a ten-percent-shrunken hippocampus. I’m talking about the brain now, brothers. That kinda stress’ll shrink it right up. Three months in a VA hospital fighting off infections and then a discharge to the States, where they threw chicken-blood on me and called me a baby-killer and wouldn’t give a vet a job . . .’
‘Just like my pops,’ Junior said. ‘It’s why he had to open this place.’
‘I show up at a flower shop looking for a job,’ Gus said. ‘Lady’s like, “Vets are drunks and dopeheads.” She doesn’t even want me shopping there. I couldn’t even spend my own legal-tender cash there, that was the thing, the outrage of it. A drunk! Hell, discrimination like that drove me to drink! I haven’t forgotten that lady. Send her mental hexes whenever I can remember. But that’s what it was like, for a man impaled in a filthy Cong pit like a hog on a stick, for a soldier who’d never questioned orders. That was my Welcome Home, Gus . . .’
With such talk he held court for the next couple of hours. His war stories were filled with specific dates, places, battles, regiments, and platoons. They were larded with the kind of sensory detail that threw us into the middle of them. He put us in a Cobra gunship and, pounding the counter with his big hands, made us feel the rattle that went through a man’s bones as the machine screamed down at treetop. He put us in hot jungle air impregnated with the stench of a thousand soldiers’ burning shit, the day’s waste incinerated at night, he explained, with jet fuel in huge tin drums. He spoke of civilian villages torched, atrocities perpetrated. ‘They tell us: no witnesses, no survivors,’ Gus said. ‘Killing becomes a blast of coke in your veins. You need the rush. You don’t care anymore. You’re a human Terminator. Trained for one thing. Killing. Stealth. Sabotage.’
‘That’s three things,’ said Telly, but Gus didn’t seem to hear.
‘Uncle Sam’ll turn you into a monster,’ Gus said. ‘But then what? You come home with a dead soul. You can’t relate. All you can do is kill. And your fucking noodle’s ten percent shrunk, so you lost your impulse-control and can’t remember your mamma’s face . . . Jesus, if I had my full brain again . . .’
He shook his head at the sawdust floor, as if watching the remains of his gray matter oozing into it. ‘I lied to that man,’ he muttered disconsolately, ‘when I threatened to skull-fuck him. My fifty-four-year-old joint don’t even work.’
‘Tell about the chopstick incident,’ Telly said.
‘The what?’ Gus asked.
‘Braining all those VC,’ Telly said.
‘And drinking piss in the jungle,’ Sal said.
Gus glared darkly at the ground, smoking. ‘Chopstick? Piss?’
‘We want to hear about it,’ Telly insisted.
‘Well . . .’ said a grim-browed Gus. ‘What’ve you heard?’
‘You know,’ Sal said. ‘How you escaped with a chopstick and drank pee.’
‘Escaped . . . pee . . .’ Gus considered quietly for a long moment, then shook his head and scowled. ‘Look: in my condition there’s lots I don’t recollect perfect. But I’ll say this: a man forced to imbibe the water of his own dingus is a desperate bastard. Would I be lying if I said I’d never been such a man? I would . . . I would.’
Deep into the evening – he might have been on his seventh or eighth free longneck – Gus stumbled outside and returned from the parking lot wearing a waist-length, raveled camouflage jacket affixed with patches of the 173rd Airborne. He put a cigar box on the bar top and began taking out war medals: three Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star Medal, and a Distinguished Service Cross. He pressed them against his cheeks and emotionally recited the names of lost friends. ‘PFC Carny “Corndog” Wilson, fragged in Da Nang . . . Second Lt. Teddy “The Pipe” Piper, julienned by a mortar shell in the Mekong Delta . . . Sgt. Micky “Twisty Mick” Mashburn, cut open like a cantaloupe at Khe-Sanh . . . all those brave boys . . .’ He unfolded old news clippings detailing the wartime bravery of one Gus Emmett Miller of the 173rd Airborne, tenderly cradling the brittle clips in his rough, sledgehammer paws.
There was an air of dissipated greatness about him, like a crumbling statue in a museum. He made me think in particular of The Dying Gaul, which I saw in an art-history book: a warrior bleeding out on the battlefield. Except with Gus, it was a drawnout, decades
-long dying, which he seemed to have a perverse need to display. Bleeding out in a storefront window; a quad who pimped out his stumps.
By about 3 a.m. most of the drinkers had stumbled home, leaving only hard-core regulars like Telly and Sal and myself. Gus seemed eager to keep what was left of his audience. ‘I’m no hero!’ he bellowed terribly. ‘Call me a soldier who did his duty, but don’t call me a fuckin’ hero! Corndog and Pipe and Twisty Mick and “mojon” Dorsey, those are heroes . . .’ He was weeping now, rolling his eyes maniacally. He hurled a pair of medals savagely against the wall. ‘I bought these with the blood of innocent civilians! Do I hate the yellow man? No – I never did . . . I never, never did . . .’
From the cigar box he removed a small stash of snapshots and passed them around. There he was, bearded and disheveled, in a long fatigue jacket and khakis, marching solemnly in a parade carrying a sign that read: ‘VIETNAM: A BLANK CHECK FOR 58,000 AMERICAN LIVES.’
‘Memorial Day in San Diego a couple years ago,’ he explained.
There he was in another photo, posing in front of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in DC with a group of guys who looked a lot like him: grim, haunted, unshaved, angry, somewhat crazy, all looking like veterans, if not of Nam, then of Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous.
Gus was proud of one photo in particular, which depicted him in close-up pressing his cheek against The Wall, his fingertips touching the doomed names on that shiny, reflective slab. His long hair poured in a tangle out of a camouflage boonie hat, and his mouth gaped in a soundless wail.
‘This one ran in the papers,’ he explained, massively drunk now. ‘Me and the boys from the vet center held some carwashes and scraped enough together to fly to The Wall. You never go alone to The Wall. The counselors will tell you that, and they’re right.’
The last photo showed him planted on a milk-crate on a freeway off-ramp, holding a donation cup and a cardboard sign that read ‘NAM VET! HOMELESS ANYTHING HELPS GOD BLESS!’ His expression was at once self-pitying, accusatory, and weirdly vainglorious.
‘That was a good spot right off the 405,’ Gus said. ‘Pulled in eighty bucks a day before the pigs ran me off.’
As I handed back the photo, he grabbed my bicep, with more force than was strictly polite, and exclaimed, ‘Wait, wait! Lookit this . . .’ He rummaged through the box and took out a necklace of what might have been a dozen dried and shriveled mushrooms. But they were not mushrooms. He draped the necklace around his throat and held one of the objects toward me. I touched it. Tough. Rubbery.
‘Ever feel a gook ear?’ Gus sputtered, leaving a mist of alcohol in my face. I jerked my hand away. ‘Souvenirs. Some of my kills. Why you lookin’ at me like that? Everybody did it.’
Gus pantomimed slicing motions in the air, and as he did so his upper body began to wobble on the stool. Sal and I caught him under the arms and helped him to his feet. He straightened, tucked his cigar box under his arm, and looked around blearily for Jesse James. ‘To the chariot, old man,’ Gus said. ‘C’mon, Jesse. C’mon to papa. Brave old boy, looking out for big Gus. C’mon.’
The dog followed us out the back door, Sal and I steadying Gus between us while that necklace of ears swung back and forth on his chest. ‘Shoulda let him fall,’ Telly muttered behind us.
The parking lot was nearly deserted, thick with late-night ocean fog. A rattletrap old van sat against a chain-link fence under fluorescent lamplight. The van was a faded blue Dodge with a ladder running up the back door and an Arizona plate that said LV1NUTR. As we headed toward it, Gus was alternately weeping, cackling, and demanding we find him some coke so he could keep partying. ‘Easy, officers,’ Gus mumbled. ‘Don’t do my pussy like that with your nightsticks, officers . . . Want some blow . . . Wanna take a dive in the snow . . .’
He fumbled his key into the back door and lifted Jesse James into the van. From what I could see of the interior, it resembled a bum’s upended shopping cart: clothes, plastic bags, food cartons, pill bottles, beer cans, blankets, car parts, birdhouses, a thousand random items, all smelling richly of dog. There was a mattress laid out on the floor in a clearing. Gus collapsed on it, rattling the van’s contents. ‘Hey,’ he said with sudden concern. ‘Where’s my medals? Someone grab ’em for me.’
I had them in my pocket. I brushed off the sawdust and handed them over. With a grunt he took them and slammed the van door. Heading back into the bar, Sal and I could hear his voice carrying across the parking lot, cursing and singing.
‘Big guy alright?’ Junior said inside.
‘He’s crashing in his van,’ Sal said. ‘Looks like he lives out of it.’
‘Goddamn tragedy,’ Junior said, shaking his head. ‘A goddamn human tragedy.’
‘I don’t like him,’ said Telly, stinko and slurring, when Junior moved away. ‘Gook ears. How morbid is that? Wonder what else is in his bag of tricks? How do you top that?’
‘You think they’re the real McCoy?’ Sal asked.
‘Tell you what,’ Telly said. ‘They don’t mean shit. I know a guy in Pomona can get ’em for you for a few bills.’
‘Rubber ones maybe, but not real,’ I said.
‘Real ones,’ Telly said. ‘He’s got a girlfriend in the morgue. Dry’em out, they look just like authentic “I-killed-’em-in-Nam” gook ears. There’s a market for everything out there, Benny. And Vietnam shit is always hot.’
‘I believe him,’ I said. ‘He’s got the thousand-yard stare. And those medals.’
‘All you need to do is get grazed in the ass, you got a Purple Heart,’ Telly said. ‘Bring home some scrotal fungus from a whorehouse in Saigon, you got two. And you get a Bronze Star just for showing up.’
‘Not a Distinguished Service Cross,’ I say. ‘We had almost three million boys over there and only a thousand came home with the DSC.’
‘He hadn’t even heard of the chopstick massacre,’ Sal said.
‘Seriously,’ Telly said. ‘Who forgets surviving on his piss in the jungle?’
‘Cut some slack to a dude with shellshock,’ I said. ‘I’m telling you, he’s got the feel.’
‘And I’m saying he talks too damn much. But whatever. Hell with him. He’ll be gone tomorrow anyhow.’
As I pedaled home through the fog, drifting past quiet rows of stucco flats with the morning’s Orange County Register and the Newport-Mesa Daily Pilot already waiting dewy on the doorsteps, past all the homes where people were living lives that were not mine, sleeping beside wives who were not mine, I couldn’t help it, I cried for the vet in the van, I cried for the 58,000 we lost, I cried for the soldier who died in operatic slo-mo in Platoon, and most of all, I guess, I cried for Benjamin Bunt – the pissed-away years that never touched heroism or tragedy in a foxhole or anywhere else – I cried for my squandered little snitch’s life.
Gus Miller moved into the Greasy Tuesday the next day.
CHAPTER 5
How did I first slip into the snitch jacket? It happened on a mild Friday afternoon two years earlier. I was sitting in the bleachers at Pomona Park, squinting through a ganja haze and hoping for fistfights as I watched the Mexicans play bloody, breakneck-paced soccer on the pitted dirt field. In my jeans: a few ounces of pot, 10 or 12 skankweed dime bags generously cut with oregano. Sitting near me: a grubby-looking cholo with tangly, unwashed hair, greasy whiskers, and a Che Guevara T-shirt tightly engorged with pectorals. Now and then he cupped his hand at his mouth, cursing the players in Spanish. Considering the roughness of the rest of him, the hand he raised looked weirdly delicate and clean, with nails that appeared buffed, a detail that in my befogged state failed to register as the warning it should have been.
‘You into Che?’ I said. ‘Te gusta Che?’
‘Que?’ he asked.
‘Che was a bad-ass,’ I said. ‘He rode a bike around South America. Bicicleta. He did some revolutionary stuff too. Revolutionario.’
‘Si, si. Revolutionario.’
‘Amigo,’ I said. ‘Quieres
mota?’
‘Marijuana?’
‘Si, si, marijuana fantastica.’
We went behind the bleachers and, as I handed over the weed, he slapped the handcuffs on me. Suddenly his English was perfect. ‘Selling weed this shitty,’ he said, inspecting my poor product, ‘there ought to be an extra charge.’
It turned out he’d been observing me for a few days. He had been staking out the park, watching for perverts. There was always someone disappearing into the park’s red-brick bathroom shack, lawyers and stockbrokers and other suits who snuck off on their lunch hour from the nearby business plazas and Newport mansions to blow the local drop-outs. (A few weeks earlier I’d seen a weeping, pleading businessman being led out of the shack in cuffs: shiny black shoes, a wedding ring, a Benz in the lot, and an apostrophe-shaped port-wine stain over his right eye. But it was his infinitely sad expression I remembered. Leading him to an unmarked cop car had been a muscular surfer punk who was, I would learn, Munoz in one of his other guises. For such stings he carried around a department-issued rubber dick.)
Now, as I sat in the back of a squad car, Munoz was telling me in a semi-apologetic tone that he knew the economy was bad, that otherwise law-abiding people were picking up some extra cash. He had none of the usual I’m-a-cop-and-you’re-a-leper vibe, so even as he took me back to the station and booked me, I couldn’t help liking him. I asked if I could hold his badge, and he didn’t hesitate: he let me. It read: DETECTIVE ALBERTO A. MUNOZ. ‘Splendid, isn’t it?’ he said as I felt the weight of it.
‘Lighter than I thought,’ I said.
‘Look,’ he said, slipping it back on his belt. ‘Maybe I can throw you a line. Tell me who supplies your shit.’
‘A line how?’
‘We can try to cut your exposure. With your record, possession with intent to sell scores you out to state time. Gimme a hand, maybe you get straight probation.’
‘I don’t like the idea of being a snitch.’
‘I understand. I admire that. I got the feeling you were the kind of guy who had a code. Everyone needs one. The thing is, a snitch is a particular thing. By definition, he does it for the scratch. See? He’s after easy money. Whereas you’re interested in something else, which is saving your ass.’
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