Snitch Jacket

by Christopher Goffard

  Gulls screamed in the rolling gray sea foam. I saw a dog wandering in the haze along the edge of the water up ahead, nosing clumps of seaweed. As I approached, it began moving toward me uncertainly, limping, its back legs trailing bandages in the wet sand.

  ‘Hey, old boy,’ I said, recognizing Jesse James.

  Abruptly the dog stopped and began growling hatefully at me, staring with those cruel, clouded eyes and dripping saliva from an open lip.

  ‘Hey. Hey, where’s Gus? Take me to your master, alright?’

  After a few moments the dog turned, and, lowering his head, loped away down the beach. I followed for a hundred yards until we reached a rock jetty. There I found Gus Miller asleep in a wedge of rock, face-up in his sleeveless chihuahua T-shirt, fleas crawling on his sunburned face and flecks of vomit in his recovering beard. He smelled of shit, sweat, salt sea, and vodka. Lacking his glasses, he looked like a different man – quieter somehow, more introspective, naked. He was caught in some nightmare that, I judged from his mumbling, seemed to involve old men beating him with canes. My shadow fell over his glistening red face, and, groaning and spluttering, he blinked up at me.

  ‘You here to punch my ticket, Bonehand?’ Gus croaked, eyes working with confusion and fear.

  ‘It’s me, Benny.’

  His mouth twisted skeptically. ‘I can’t see your face. Where’s my specs?’

  After a minute’s searching I retrieved them from a nearby rock and slid them on his fat, heat-sticky face, which lay so rigidly sunward that he might have been the victim of some Apache severed-eyelid torture meant to burn out his retinas. He studied me through the lopsided slant of his lenses and said, with a dry voice leached of all emotion, ‘I thought you were fuckin’ death, come to make me answer. But you’re just my boy Benny. Hey, Benny.’

  ‘Why you out here?’

  ‘I guess maybe I was hoping to snuff myself.’

  ‘Snuff yourself?’

  ‘I was thinking the crabs could carry me away. Work me through their crab guts and crap me all over the ocean floor. Little meal for the bottom feeders. Next I’m a thirty-buck shellfish plate on the pier. Great cycle of life. But I’m rescued. It’s a sign.’

  The prospect of survival seemed infinitely wearying to him. He sat up slowly and placed his back against a rock, his knees bent in front of him. He patted the pockets of his jeans and from one of them freed a thick wad of soggy, sand-covered bills wrapped in a rubber band. Holding up the bills, he thumbed them, studying them as if to reassure himself of their reality. They were all hundreds; there might be a few thousand dollars there.

  ‘Fact is, I hit a payday and decided to celebrate and got a little carried away and then decided I may as well snuff myself,’ Gus said. ‘I got pretty you might say depressed.’

  ‘You could’ve reached out.’

  He grunted ambiguously and said, ‘It ain’t really dying I’m scared of. It’s the all-alone part that kills me. A good death would be you’re gnawed apart by vultures live on national television. Or going like one of those crackhead basketball players that drop in front of fifty thousand people . . .’

  Mumbling, he added, ‘The rich are very strange. Stranger than me, and I’m brain-damaged. Except if you’re rich you’re allowed to be as fucked-up as you want, and they just call it “eccentric” and “colorful.” Hey, boy, hey . . .’

  Jesse James had come up to lick his face; Gus enveloped the dog in his arms, smiling wanly as the dog offered languid old- dog kisses. Then he said, ‘Help me up. My foot’s hurt and I’ve got metal spikes going in behind my eyeballs.’

  With the dog trotting a few paces ahead, Gus limped alongside me over acres of sand back to the van, where he stripped off his soiled clothes and, upending a Hefty bag plucked from his astounding masonry of interlocking junk, found another pair of worn jeans and another faded T-shirt to put on. He neatened the dog’s bandages and muttered something vague about an accident. I filled an Arrowhead jug with sink water from a nearby bathroom, and he tipped it over the dog’s throat and then chugged the rest himself, his throat pumping.

  Twenty minutes later we were sitting in the cool of a Harbor Boulevard taco joint – Jesse James fed and resting on a slab of shaded pavement outside – and Gus, hydrated and glutted with Tylenol, was fumblingly unwrapping his fifth fat burrito.

  ‘I’ve, uh – hit a geyser,’ Gus said slowly around a mouthful of beef, in a tone that suggested he couldn’t quite believe his luck and yet wasn’t sure luck was the right word for it. ‘I’m sitting on what you call a heavy-sugar proposition. This bulge next to my dick? Payment for services to be rendered. If I’m not going to snuff it, and it looks now like I ain’t, it’s a real tough proposition for me to turn down. In fact, shit, it’s maybe just what I need. Bar crawling is really no life for an aging outlaw troubadour. I’ve always thought Tehachapi would be a good place to shift into quiet gear. Beautiful desert up there. I don’t need a shitload of acreage, just enough. A garden for Jesse, a shed to fuck around in, a place for a lot of beautiful birds. No more begging for old Gus, and no more Salvation Army horsemeat, and no more handouts from that Australian who runs that bar. What an idiot he is.’ He gazed out the window, puzzling over something, every year of his life visible in the cracks of his forehead. ‘Look, I put stock in signs. I’m a Venice boy. Born the day they dropped the A-bomb on Bikini Atoll, and I always felt that ought to mean something. “Son of the bomb,” you know? What did it mean? I never could figure out what. Anyway, my whole shitty childhood I spent here in California, then a lot of the rest of my life I spent anywhere else I could think of. And now they led me out here again.’

  ‘Who’s “they”?’

  ‘Signs. Don’t ask what kind. But I’d been asking for one, and passing through Arizona I got a motherfucker of one, and it said, “Go to Orange County, go to the Greasy Tuesday.” And I just been waiting and waiting for something to happen since I got here, thinking after a while, “The universe’s fucking with me again. Pulling a nasty trick on a sucker who won’t learn. There’s nothing out here, nothing behind the curtain at all.” And now, finally . . .’ Putting his elbows on the table, leaning his bulky shoulders toward me, he added: ‘I think you know what I’m telling you here. I’d like to bring you in.’

  ‘I’m not sure I know what you mean.’

  He looked at me with opaque squinting eyes, as if surprised at my denseness and suddenly uncertain how far he could trust me. ‘What I’m saying, if I needed help with a thing . . .’

  ‘A thing? You mean a thing?’

  ‘Right. I’m saying. You understand?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Well, that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about.’

  ‘You mean . . .’

  ‘Look, Gus Miller has been bent over the barrel before. A man’s dog, he knows he can trust. But people are a different animal.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you’ve just gotta be careful who you confide in.’

  ‘The main thing is, it’s like that song that goes “Something something, loose the fatal lightning, bla bla bla, whatever, the terrible swift sword . . .”’

  ‘Glory, glory, hallelujah . . .’

  ‘Right, right.’ His eyes widened in blustery emphasis. ‘Brother, Gus Miller is that lightning. And it’s about to fall. There’s a mission to be done, one last balls-to-the-wall road trip to be taken, and I need some ordnance and some backup.’

  ‘Why me?’

  In a softer tone, he said, ‘Look, I’m stupid on a lot of things in this world. I never finished tenth grade, my brain don’t work right anymore, and some would say I ought to be institutionalized. But one thing I know, and that’s this . . .’ Leaning across the table between us, he poked a finger tenderly into my chest. ‘I’m an Einstein of the human heart. I’ve got credentials out the asshole on it. Character! I’ve survived this long by being able to read it. And you, Benny, are a stand-up individual. I mean, you might have saved my worthless life out there. No one else g
ave enough of a shit to come find me. All my old road dogs are dead or locked up. So you’re the only one I trust with a job like this. It’s only a couple days’ work, good pay, adventure, invaluable life experience . . .’

  ‘You mean – – ’

  ‘Stop with that stupid look. You’re not as dumb as you pretend to be. I’m talking your basic All-American contract hit.’

  Back in the van he searched under the dashboard until he found a Maxell tape labeled ‘C’s Recital.’ He didn’t say where he got it. Sliding it into the deck, he said, ‘ You wanna hear something beautiful? The chick that did this was fifteen.’

  Into the musty air of the cab poured the sound of a single trembling violin. I couldn’t name the piece, nor the notes, nor even the key; I don’t know classical music. But it was a sound like an extinct Andean bird trying to climb the steps of the wind, something alternately plaintive, wistful, and brave. Very beautiful. The music rose and expanded and filled the filthy van. I looked over and Gus had his eyes closed and his chin uptilted like a sleeping Buddha. We just sat there until it was over, the hit-man and I, listening in our separate places. That bird kept going.

  PART II

  THE COWBOY

  CHAPTER 15

  It’s three days before my prelim, and Goins is late for this morning’s session. I’ve been waiting in the interview room for 40 minutes, my hands manacled to the table, by the time he shuffles in with sweat-stains in his pits, looking tired and not at all apologetic. His battered old suitcase bears faded stickers that say ‘VOTE GREEN’ and ‘BROWN FOR GOVERNOR.’

  ‘Counselor Groins!’ I say. ‘My pubic defender. My public pretender.’

  ‘Benny,’ he grunts, sitting down heavily and opening his briefcase. ‘I had three other clients to see.’

  The Three Stooges are making stupid faces on his tie. I glare at it sullenly and refuse to speak until he gets the point that I disapprove, I disapprove with the utmost kind of serious disapproval.

  ‘My protest against the greasy pole,’ he says finally, catching on. ‘My way of saying “No thanks” to the rat-race.’

  ‘Isn’t there a dress code?’

  ‘Nobody gets less respect than a free lawyer. My whole office turns over every three years. I’m there going on twenty. Two hundred felony trials under my belt. They’re not about to sack me.’

  Overworked, underloved, and pale as a dead fish’s distended gut, Goins exudes ill health, incipient stroke, or cardiac arrest. I wish I could afford a real lawyer. I heard of a defendant who slugged his public defender and the court had to give him a free private defense attorney. But they might just give me another PD. Plus I’m not a violent man, and I have come to like Goins; I identify with his misfitness.

  ‘How come you never went private,’ I say, ‘go for the bucks?’

  He doesn’t say anything for a few moments, and I can tell he’s debating what it would mean to answer the question, whether he wants to permit a personal fissure in the strict lawyer – client wall. Giving up anything personal to a potential sociopath is dangerous. Yet he knows it’s unfair to ask me to divulge all the heartmeat stuff without a dollop of good-faith reciprocity from him – or at least a show of it.

  ‘I hung out a shingle a while back,’ he says finally. ‘I decided I liked to eat too much.’

  ‘You didn’t have the chops?’

  His expression is strained. ‘I found I didn’t have the appetite for all the hustling. Shaking hands, self-promotion, all of that. I found it all extremely wearying.’

  ‘What brought you out here to Bumfuck, Egypt?’ I say.

  ‘My wife’s folks are here. Believe me, I didn’t think I’d wind up in Mojave. Ever heard of a lawyer named Barry Groutmanstein?’

  ‘The one who’s always on Larry King?’

  ‘Law-school buddy of mine,’ says Goins. ‘He wasn’t always a prick. He even had ideals.’

  I smile conspiratorially, to encourage gossip. I can tell he wants very badly to dump on the famous Groutmanstein. I’m a good audience. I welcome it. He tells me that Groutmanstein once dropped a murder defendant – one with a winnable case – because the guy ran out of money. Goins finds this despicable, beneath contempt. I shake my head grimly, agreeing. Beneath contempt! Goins still sees Groutmanstein every few years, on trips to LA . He seems to have memorized every detail of Groutmanstein’s 35th-floor office, as if he’s measured it mentally for himself a hundred times. ‘Obscene,’ Goins says with a snort. ‘ Wraparound windows, fumed-oak bookcases, Corinthian leather armchairs. And this whole over-the-top predator theme: brass eagle busts, pictures of Alaskan bears, a stuffed white wolf. How he sees himself. Ridiculous! And of course, he puts every story ever written about him on the wall. Lawyer-of-the-Year stuff. Funny thing, back in the day? Exam time, he always came to me for help. The professors knew, too. Who was smarter. Two roads diverged, et cetera. Whatever . . .’

  His voice trails away. He seems to be making himself depressed.

  ‘I’ve never understood how it is you guys do what you do,’ I say. ‘Defending guys you know are guilty all the time and pretending they’re not.’

  ‘I get that at barbecues,’ Goins answers with a touch of irritation. ‘Particularly from the in-laws, who are John Birchers. And what I say is, it’s not so much the individual I’m defending as the integrity of the system. Because God help the little guy — guys like you — who get sucked into it.’

  ‘Still, a murderer is a murderer, and a murderer deserves to be punished.’

  ‘You realize that if every defendant exercised his right to trial, the system would collapse? You know why? They expect you to get scared and plead, save them the trouble of proving it. Say you shoplift a Hershey bar, and you knock a guard’s hand off your shoulder. Boom! That’s assault during the commission of a theft. Say you happen to have a whittling knife in your pocket. Boom! Assault while in possession of a deadly weapon. Prior record? Boom! They can send you away forever. And they will. I’m here to make sure they play by the rules.’

  ‘What about a baby rapist? You’d stand up for one of them?’

  ‘I’d stand up for anyone,’ says Goins. ‘That’s my pride, Benny. Few years ago, I had a guy accused of strangling his wife with a Mr. Coffee cord. A junkie, and they made him sweat through withdrawal while they interrogated him for two days straight.’

  ‘I’ve detoxed. You’d want a bullet in your head first.’

  ‘Exactly – torture. The cops tortured him to get their confession. Did he kill her? Probably. But I worked up some motions, blistering stuff, top form, and I got the confession thrown out, and he walked. The PD’s Association gave me a plaque. Last year, the guy’s back. He stomped his kid and put her in a coma. Do I take that stuff home? Do I dream about it? Do I wish for someone else’s life once in a while? Sure I do. Do I do my job anyway? You bet I do – like a professional. I don’t get to pick and choose. I don’t get to say, “I only represent the nice guys, or the totally innocent ones.”’

  Goins studies the tip of his pen. By his expression I can tell he said a little more than he wanted. Clients usually don’t give enough of a shit to ask him personal questions, so maybe I caught him off-guard.

  ‘You ever get one?’ I say.

  ‘Get one what?’

  ‘An innocent guy. Saved his life. Have you?’

  He rubs his temples in slow, semicircular motions. ‘Factually innocent versus technically? I dunno,’ he says. ‘It’d be a nice thing to hang your hat on, at the end of the day. But like I said, for what I do, innocent and guilty are really irrelevant categories.’

  There is something wrong about his voice when he says this, something tinny and mechanical and disembodied, as if he’s reciting a prayer memorized a long time ago, from a religion he’s no longer sure he believes in. Not deep down, not at a cellular level.

  ‘Well,’ I say, ‘I’d like to be able to make you believe that I’m one of them.’

  ‘One what?’

  ‘An innocent m
an.’

  He nods slowly, looking me over, and gives me a small, noncommittal smile. It’s clear from his eyes how badly he longs to believe in the slumped, desperate little man sitting across from him. Longs to believe, in spite of himself, that Benny Bunt is not just another name in the gallery of monsters he has been charged with defending. I suspect my lawyer is sick with himself. I think of a thin, fresh-faced young Goins, a bright law student carrying his law books to class, propelled by phosphor-dot Perry Mason fantasies as deep-seated as my own Steven Bochco dreams. But in the real world his clients are pond scum, and he could say ‘I’m defending the integrity of the system’ all day long — he could even keep going for a while on the pure juice of courtroom competition – but at the end of the day, he doesn’t dream about his victories. He dreams about the kid in the coma with the kicked-in head.

  As I look at Goins, sitting across from me, waiting for me to tell the rest, his face different now from the cold mask he wore when I first met him, I understand that he longs for some unambiguous injustice to correct, something even the John Bircher in-laws could not write off. He’s been auditioning me for this role. He’s wondering whether I will be the newspaper clipping he keeps in his wallet as an old man and fishes out to show strangers in the park. The one he sends to Groutmanstein with the note, ‘I saved a good man’s life. What have you done with your millions lately? Cheers.’

  He wants so badly to believe in me, and I want so badly not to let him down.

  Now he says, ‘Just keep building me the bridge, Benny. Between Orange County and the Mojave Desert. Plank by plank. Leave nothing out, however minor it seems. Gus Miller has a contract. What happens next?’

  ‘I do what any responsible citizen would do. I sell out my best friend to the law.’