Snitch Jacket

by Christopher Goffard

  ‘Wayne Williams,’ I said.

  ‘Right,’ Gus said. ‘Benny’s the Trivia King. Company boxes are no way to go either, if you’re not an amateur and you’re not trying to get caught.’ Thinking, shaking his head, he added in sympathy: ‘Not to mention, shit, what happened to that poor girl. Can you imagine her folks sitting through that trial like they are, and keeping their hands off him?’

  ‘You know,’ Sal said later, when Gus disappeared to run some errand, ‘that he’s a hit-man?’

  ‘He told you that?’ I asked.

  ‘He confided it in me,’ Sal replied.

  ‘He confided it in me too, and I don’t even like him,’ Telly said.

  ‘I guess it’s a confidence he’s proud of sharing,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you like him?’

  ‘Bullshit king. He’s always gotta be right,’ Telly replied. He squinted at my Army jacket. ‘And who do you think you are in that?’

  ‘It’s a cool jacket,’ I said, stiffening my back in it, soldierlike.

  ‘Yeah? What’s your kill-count?’ Telly said.

  I decided I would have to put him in jail again soon.

  The burning source of Telly’s animosity toward Gus remained obscure to me – and to everyone else – until several nights later. That night, Gus was feeling sorry for himself and was muttering about how the world had never stopped pissing on him, even after all he’d given. No, the world was short on love for Gus Miller. Always had been, but that was okay. Because he’d learned to make do with the love he got from his dog, and the special love he got from the people who listened to his stories (which love lasted exactly as long as he had their attention). In a tremulous, quiet tone, he said, ‘You know, Benny, I’ve always felt like the world’s nigger. I never had the advantages.’

  ‘The world has niggers of all colors it kicks around.’

  ‘That’s what I’m saying. Look, you – uh – – ’ He pounded back his beer and tried to look at me, but his eyelids fluttered involuntarily in a series of quick blinks; he couldn’t quite hold my face. ‘What I said that day at the beach, I don’t tell nobody. I, uh, it means, you know, a lot, having a buddy.’

  ‘Sure, Gus.’

  Then neither of us could think of anything to say. A minute stretched into two minutes, and it became excruciating. Finally Gus alighted on the idea of taking out the bowie knife he kept strapped to his boot. Saying, ‘Watch this shit!’ he spread his right hand on the bar and began tapping the blade lightly in the spaces between his fat splayed fingers. It looked particularly dangerous, considering there was very little bar between the lumpy meat prongs. Half a dozen people came over to watch as he sped up, the blade moving in a blur over his knuckles and going wick-whack! wick-whack! wick-whack! He knicked himself slightly, but managed to remove his hand before anyone noticed but me, leaving the wobbling blade standing in the knicked wood. A modest round of applause followed, and he said, ‘This show ain’t gratis! I’m accepting drinks now!’

  Someone cried, ‘Whatever he wants,’ and Gus touched the bill of his Yankees cap in gratitude and asked for something called Blue Fire. It was a whiskey shot you set on fire and drank blazing – a favorite, Gus said, of the hardluck bastards like himself who had to endure those long sweltering nights at Bien Hoa Air Base in Southeast Asia. He made a little ceremony of it now, touching his lighter to the alcohol and smiling as the blue flame ignited. Always nostalgic, he recalled that the first time he and the boys in the 173rd tried it, the Stones were doing ‘Honky Tonk Woman’ on the radio. By great good fortune, it happened to be one of the three Stones songs on the jukebox here; carrying his incandescent drink across the room, he dropped a quarter into the box and, as the music cranked, started assaulting the air with an invisible drumstick wielded in his free hand. Then, tilting his head back, he upended the flaming shot over his gaping gullet, slammed the glass down on the counter and exclaimed, ‘Ooaaaaaahhh.’ A curl of flame had attached itself to his whiskers an inch below the chin. It began smoking. He didn’t notice, he just sat there, his skull split by a satyr’s stupid grin, running his tongue along his lips to catch the last drops of goodness, saying, ‘Ooaaaaaahhh, ooaaaaaahhh, sergeant . . .’ and unleashing those annihilating drum riffs. As our poor barkeep knew so bitterly, the Greasy Tuesday was not teeming with men who rushed to render aid in a pinch. In a generous state of mind I attributed this immobility to an almost Hinduistic respect for fate, a feeling that misfortunes must run their course without interference; but the more likely reason was the pure reptile joy of seeing other people fucked up. And in Gus’s case there was the added pleasure of seeing the barroom bully-braggart fucked up, to which even I, his friend, was not immune. So Gus burned and burned for a good 10 seconds, fire eating his goatish gray thatch, climbing and crackling up to his jaw line, illuminating the passive faces of the men ranged around the bar, who with flames flickering in their staring gimlet eyes resembled a cabal of rats at an unholy bonfire. It fell to me to save Gus. Reaching over the bar, I snatched up the water hose and fired three quick jets at the conflagration. Amid a great hissing and rising of smoke, Gus jumped to his feet, startled and angry, his hands waving and batting at the air. After a marathon coughing jag he sat down, water dripping from the chewed remains of his beard, and, with the awful stench of 10,000 incinerated bristles impregnating the air around him, grunted, ‘Which is why it ain’t for pussies. Gimme another!’ So he downed one more, to prove he could. Good enough as comebacks went, I suppose, but as poor Gus sat there, pretending to ignore that ashy swath of blowtorched beaver hanging off his face, with those crooked glasses on his nose, he looked shrunken, humbled, and ridiculous. He looked . . . vulnerable.

  A very drunk Telly Grimes, who had been watching Gus’s near-immolation with barely concealed glee, left his stool and walked over to the jukebox, squinting against the convex glass at the Rolodex of songs. He returned without having inserted any coins and said into his drink, with a tense little smile, ‘Funny, that song wasn’t out till ’69.’

  Gus, gazing slack-eyed into the smoke, seemed to realize that the remark was directed toward him, but gave in response only an indifferent grunt.

  ‘You were with the 173rd, right?’ Telly said.

  ‘I said I was, didn’t I?’ Gus replied.

  ‘Bien Hoa Air Base, right?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘You heard “Honky Tonk Woman” there?’

  ‘I guess that’s what I said.’

  Telly’s bloodsucker smile widening to its capacity, his gapped and forward-slanting fangs on full, insolent display, he said, ‘Well, that’s pretty funny.’

  ‘Why’s that funny, amigo?’

  ‘Because the Stones didn’t come out with it till ’69. Check the jukebox if you don’t believe me.’

  ‘Why do I give a shit?’

  ‘Because the 173rd had moved on to II Corps by then, amigo,’ Telly said. ‘They left Bien Hoa in ’67. I know because my cousin was there.’

  A silence extended itself over the bar like death-bringing biblical fog; my barmates suddenly found themselves fascinated by the ice cubes in their gin and the Surgeon General’s fine-print advisories on their bottles about beer consumption during pregnancy. Gus walked slowly and heavily to the jukebox, peering in for a long moment. Then he came back and said, ‘That date’s a misprint. Ask Benny. He’s Mr. Memory.’

  ‘Well . . .’ I said, weighing my loyalties, calculating the risks, beginning to perspire. And before I could think of the smart answer, I said, ‘Actually, it was a ’69 song.’

  ‘Sonofabitch!’ Gus bellowed, slapping the bar with his palm and turning to Telly. ‘You gotta mind like a steel trap, brother. But if you knew anything at all about PTSD, you would know that memory loss is one of the classic symptoms. Classic! I’ve got all of ’em: amnesia, insomnia, fear of intimacy, substance abuse’ – swigging a longneck – ‘sudden feelings of fear and anxiety traceable to no external source, feelings of worthlessness, impotency . . .’

  ‘Shel
lshock, right?’ Telly said.

  ‘It’s called PTS-fucking-D!’ thundered Gus, an ugly vein standing forth on his forehead. ‘It’s an American Psychiatric Association-recognized condition! It’s legit! And I’m legitimately fucked-up!’

  ‘Shut up, Telly,’ panted a sweating Sal.

  He seemed to be thinking of that bowie knife, hilt-up on the bar top before Gus.

  ‘Sure,’ slurred Telly, his smile frozen humorlessly on his face, like some dentist had applied painful invisible clamps to the sides of his mouth to get at his molars. ‘Sure . . .’

  ‘Every man in this bar has seen my scars, motherfucker.’

  ‘But you know what?’ said courage-crazed Telly, addressing the whole bar now, in thrall to some principle he’d perhaps just discovered he possessed. ‘You know what? My cousin Teddy was there in The Shit. And I know other guys that were there in The Shit. And what they have in common is, you can know them for ten years without ever knowing they’d been in The Shit. Because what The Shit is all about is, no one who’s been in it wants to talk about it all the fucking time.’

  ‘Maybe you need to call it a night, Telly,’ Junior said, discreetly removing the bowie knife from the bar top. ‘You’re talking bullshit now. Everyone knows that’s not true. Otherwise where do all those movies come from? And Gus may take it as an insult.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Telly said, ‘our badboy war-hero hit-man communist-killing janitor might feed my ears to his farting old pooch . . .’

  Telly flattened his money against the bar and stood up. Putting one snakeskin boot in front of the other, he made his way slowly and coolly toward the back door, even pausing to take a drag from someone’s cigarette, just to show he was in no hurry. Whether by dint of guts or lunacy or alcohol, he pulled it off so it looked like victory; I had to admit it was impressive.

  Gus didn’t turn to watch him leave.

  He waited a full 20 seconds before following Telly out the back door.

  The bar emptied fast. People spilled their drinks trying to get outside.

  In the parking lot Gus was engaged in a tug-of-war with Telly’s brown DeVille over the Chupacabra’s wriggling, kicking body. Grunting Gus was pulling one way – trying to haul Telly by the armpits through the half-open driver’s side window – and the car was stubbornly refusing to surrender him. Telly’s body was four feet off the ground and nearly horizontal, like a magician writhing on invisible strings in some trick that had gone hideously awry. Only the snakeskin boot on his left foot, tenaciously lodged under the roof, kept him attached to the car. For a good 10 or 15 seconds, everything hinged on that piece of scaly footwear, Gus glowering at it like an unexpected curse, while a yelping, terrified Telly eyeballed it like his last hope; despair filled his face as, inch by inch, he watched it peeling off his heel. Then whoosh! — the boot was tenantless, Gus and Telly sailing backward as a pair. Slamming into a Pontiac, Gus lost hold of his victim, and all the pounds that comprised him translated into a titanically messy topple over the right fender and onto the hood and then straight into the cracked blacktop. It seemed to happen in slow motion, so that at every stage in his ass-over-teakettle trajectory toward the pavement you could witness another humiliating defeat to gravity, his inky meatslab arms flailing to brace his off-kilter mass, fat hands scrabbling every-which-way to avert that nasty asphalt terminus, but clutching only air. Gravity was not his friend, not at all; give it an inch against him and it owned him, that hypertrophied upper half and those spindly supporting pegs transformed into a 300-pound earthbound missile.

  By the time Gus climbed to his feet, raising himself with a hand on the bumper of the car that had betrayed him, Telly had scrambled back into his DeVille and rolled the window up tight. He fired the ignition and, as in every horror movie you ever saw, it coughed and sputtered a few times before catching. Telly looked up to see Gus looming over the hood with his fists cocked above his head, howling. Down came the fists, sledgehammering brick-sized dents in the hood and shattering the left headlight and making the car lurch up and down like a quarter-activated supermarket pony. Watching this with stupefied disbelief, Telly, the man with the steel-trap memory, remembered that he probably ought to drive away. He dumped the DeVille into reverse and jerked backward. Gus, hands affixed to the fender, refused to let go; he held on for a full couple of seconds before sprawling to the pavement again, this time with face-first finality. The DeVille careened into the street while Gus sat up, ashen, panting, the broken skin of his forehead embedded with asphalt pebbles, while sweat poured in violent runnels down his face and glistened in the patches of his fire-mutilated beard.

  Someone handed him the orphaned snakeskin boot, and Gus held it in his lap like some kind of prize, some kind of validation, though to me he looked like an oversized retarded kid gaping at a toy he’d broken, trying to grasp why it came apart in his hands.

  ‘Benny,’ Gus said. ‘Nitro. Need my fucking n-n-nitro. A little overwrought here. My t-ticker . . .’

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘S-shitwagon . . . g-glove box,’ Gus said, handing me the keys to his Dodge.

  Johnny-on-the-spot, I rummaged through the glove box and came back with the pill-bottle labeled ‘Miller, Gustavo.’ He sucked one down with saliva and sat gasping for another minute, then his breathing grew slow and steady and controlled and the color returned to his face. Jesse James, again the last to join the scene, trotted out on his shaky old limbs to lick his master’s martyred face, with age-weary but ardent affection.

  It took two or three of us to help Gus to his feet and back into the bar. His face was full of shame and hatred. Junior brought him gauze bandages and rubbing alcohol and gave him back his bowie knife, saying, ‘I took it for your own good.’

  Junior seemed to want to say something more, something harsher, something critical, like Don’t bring this shit in here.

  ‘ You know,’ Gus said, holding the blade up for a moment before slipping it back in its ankle-sheath, ‘back in The Shit, I once saw your pops use one of these to open up a pregnant village girl. Those were some tough times for all involved.’

  The blood drained out of Junior’s face.

  For the next couple of hours my barmates took turns buying Gus longnecks and putting pieces of the DeVille’s broken headlight in front of him like jewels, goodwill offerings. The boys said things like ‘Way to go’ and ‘He had it coming’ and ‘He needed a beating.’ It was understood that Telly had been way out of line. You didn’t piss on a man’s pride, whatever your passion for historical accuracy; you allowed a man his embellishments or memory mix-ups.

  But Sal, Telly’s best friend, sat watching grimly from a far corner of the bar, flicking his lighter until the gas ran out and there was no flame, but only the tiny sound of incessant scraping.

  Gus drank quietly and stared forlornly at the snakeskin boot that stood before him on the bar top, the boot’s spine broken midway so that its top half sagged, and Gus staring as if seeing his entire personal tragedy embodied in it. A lifetime of battles, and only this bent reptilian trophy to show for it.

  ‘Johnny Cash could write the song,’ I said with a nudge to Junior, but Junior just stood there looking sick, gazing at the photograph of his father on the wall.

  CHAPTER 14

  Gus disappeared the next day, with his van and his dog, leaving behind his mattress and his books and his padlocked freezer and his cigar box full of medals and ears. For three days, no one heard from him, and it would be a lie to say he was much missed. Then word got to me that he was on some kind of marathon bender, crawling between beach bars down on Balboa Island and raising a lot of hell. Whether I worried about what might happen to him, or found myself angry that he didn’t invite me for the party, I couldn’t say; but some impulse I should have ignored sent me looking for him.

  I had picked up some under-the-counter scutwork on the Island, a few hours a day peeling shrimp and scrubbing floors for a fish shack. After a morning shift, pedaling around the beach strip in t
he cruel, blinding heat of a cloudless late-summer afternoon, I found myself on a wavering, heat-distorted expanse of bleached parking lot pavement, and in the distance, marooned there like some monstrous prehistoric crab carcass, its shell protected by punishing disks of daylight, sat Gus’s dusty Dodge. As I approached I found a parking ticket with yesterday’s date stuck under the windshield wiper. The hood was hot as a stovetop. With my palm I rubbed off a circle of dust and peered through the back window. Nobody inside: just those flea market towers of packrat treasure slouching against each other in fantastic gravity-defying shapes, like those mortarless interlocking Inca stones you see on the History Channel that not only manage to hold together, but also outlast all conquerors and earthquakes.

  Chaining my bike, I kicked off my Converse All-Stars and walked out onto the white, hot beach in my sweat socks. That kind of sun’s no good for you, and if you ever had some cancer spots, like me, and if you read up on the statistics, like me, you would dress like I did for the beach: feet covered, long sleeves, collar up, big floppy fisherman’s cap pulled down tight.

  My eyes followed the diminishing line of quadrupedal wood-plank lifeguard towers that rose out of the pitted sand every few hundred feet. Passing under their slanting legs, I discovered they were empty all the way down the line. I found myself thinking that on the day the dead rose from the ocean for the final war against the living (and this afternoon’s parched, brooding desolation gave a hint of that day’s weather), these sea-towers would prove terrific sniper-posts for mankind’s resistance fighters; perhaps some George A . Romero-inspired official even had such a secret use in mind in building them. Underneath were little oases of cool shadow in which I paused to rest, squatting and breathing.

  No one was swimming in the Pacific today, and there was no wind. Miles out, minute, windless white sail-flecks hung dead in the water. There were just a few bodies on the beach, each alone in its own empire of empty sand: indistinct shapes quivering in the distance on blankets and beach chairs with hundreds of yards separating one from another. And above, the heat glaring down like the lunatic eye of a flower, and breeding cancers in their skin.