Snitch Jacket

by Christopher Goffard

  The birds didn’t know (their bosses hadn’t told them) about the men in the bushes below with the shotguns; didn’t know that in a moment they’d all drop from the perfect sky like stones.

  ‘. . . try not to smudge . . . not doing anything without a few more concretes . . . information is . . .’

  They were dispensable. They were fucking birds. They were easily manipulated, having birdbrains. But they should have suspected this.

  ‘. . . you there?’ The gash deepening between Wein’s eyes, dark and harsh. ‘I’m not telling you this for my edification, mister. Repeat PowerPoint Number Two.’

  ‘Prints . . . intelligence . . .’

  ‘Intelligence!’ Wein said. ‘We need it. Flatter, wheedle, cajole, buy him drinks, whatever you need to do, but get him talking.’

  ‘My man here is a professional elicitor of intelligence,’ Munoz said. ‘His ass has a bag a tricks like Felix the Cat! That’s you, right, Benny?’

  I heard myself grunting in assent. Then there was a pen in my hand and I was putting my signature on the bottom of a form that said: ‘CONSENT TO INTERCEPT COMMUNICATION WITHOUT WARRANT.’

  ‘You just got the part in the school play, bro,’ Munoz said. ‘Cinch if you think of it like that. Didn’t you always wanna be in the school play?’

  ‘ Who-what-where-when-why,’ Wein said, holding his palm toward me with outsplayed fingers that he peeled down one by one, counting five. ‘The five Ws.’

  ‘I’m supposed to get him a gun. He gave me a hundred and fifty dollars.’

  ‘Tell him you’re working on it, you need more time, whatever,’ Wein said. ‘Delay.’

  Somehow I managed to ask for money. Wein was on his feet. ‘ We’ll need something a little harder before we tap the hardworking taxpayers of this city,’ he said. On the way through the door he added, ‘Details to nail.’

  Munoz peeled four twenties from his wallet and clasped them in my moist palm.

  ‘From my own pocket,’ he said. ‘There’s no guarantee yet there’s even a for-real crime being planned, and I don’t get paid back unless we get some usable intel. So this speaks to the reservoir of goodwill between us.’

  ‘I didn’t know that’s how it worked. Thank you, Detective.’

  ‘Call me Al, Cowboy.’

  ‘Look, I don’t wanna let you down, but . . . I don’t know if I’m made for this.’

  ‘Sure you are. You’re like me. You’re a goddamn pistolero. A pistolero in the school play.’

  CHAPTER 17

  It wasn’t a part I was ready to play, however, not a role supportable by the little nerve I possessed. Already I regretted going to Munoz with what Gus had told me. Somehow, a line had been crossed. Snitchwise, I had suddenly been pitched out of the kiddie-pool shallows where I dwelled comfortably into barracuda water, with no current home save cooperation. Exhausted, I found a bench in Pomona Park and closed my eyes and tried to get my head straight, and suddenly I was caught in a terrifying dream.

  In it, flames rose around Gus Miller’s fat and smiling face. His beard burning and crackling, but not consumed, not diminished. Flames climbing in long tongues around his cheeks, tips wriggling toward his smiling eyes.

  — When are you gonna fix those fucking glasses?

  His lenses tilted so far to one side they were falling off his face. As his head burned, he toasted me with a flaming shot-glass.

  – It ain’t the glasses that’s crooked, Gus said. It’s my head.

  – You shouldn’t have done Gwen that way. True love doesn’t come around that often. Do you understand about true love?

  He drank fire from a flaming pumpkin, saying:

  – A boy loves his dog. It’s in a story.

  Jesse James stood over me with his bad, cataract-occluded eyes. His teeth were tearing off steaming gobbets of my torso while I watched with a detached, nerveless horror. My innards turning into sausage-links as they disappeared down his maw. The dog licking me, his spit glistening all over my body. Didn’t I hear somewhere that certain dogs’ saliva is poisonous? I burned all over, soaked in venom, aflame with napalm jelly, screaming . . .

  Jolt awake. I lay slumped on the park bench. My heart was hammering. I’m so tired. I’m so tired. My mind is going to kill me. I needed something. I needed help. I couldn’t do this thing without help. Make me fearless. Make me supercool.

  Being a frightened Benny, a cowardly and unsteely Benny, I did a stupid thing. I went looking for Moe Shanks, the man who supplied me with meth (and employed me) during my blurry, eye-twitching, teeth-grinding stint as a committed tweaker during the Reagan Era.

  Ninety-eight hours without sleep: my proud personal best, back in the day. Not so impressive for some of the career speed freaks I knew, who could binge two weeks straight minus a wink. But nevertheless an experience frightening enough to make me realize no sleep was the quickest route to the mind’s unraveling. Sleeplessness spaded up the brain’s buried maggots and amplified them to lurid Creature Feature dimensions.

  Moe Shanks ran a landscaping company in Newport and paid half his staff in speed. Shrewd Moe winning both ways: he got a fleet of tireless lawn boys and he got to keep the cash proceeds of their labor. Naturally the first few lines he gave you free, along with his reassurances: ‘Don’t worry, kiddo. The only mind game is shadow people.’

  A half-assed caveat emptor, to say the least. Apart from seeing malevolent conspirators in random shadows, which is a constant, the real hallucinations start squirming out on day two. The truly scary ones commence thereafter. Postmen follow you like KGB agents. Claws reach for your ankles from the gutters. Wigshop windows become a gallery of maniacally chatty severed heads. It doesn’t stop you from wanting to extend the binge, though. Crystal meth is still the closest you ever get to feeling like Spider-Man.

  Not that you do anything heroic. Oh, no. Mostly you sit in your room with your shades pulled (they are out there). Shave off a line. Incline conveniently ventilated skull. Line up those custom-made twin cranial delivery slits. Find the runway. Nasty napalm burn. Toxic drain-cleaner/lye cocktail raping your throat. Find the next. Now you’re alright. Bulletproof, in fact. Adamantine skin and a Lamborghini Spyder engine gunning in your chest. Time to color! Get out the fucking Crayolas. Attack your Thrifty’s paint-by-the-numbers kits. Technicolor sword-and-sorcery scenes lining up all along the wall. Then the real treat, the main event: your special jar of nuts and bolts. Pour them out on the coffee table. Fabulous toys for a meth monster. No happiness like laying siege to a fat pile of nuttage and boltage. Screw all the nuts onto all the bolts. Unscrew them and start over. Screw, unscrew, screw, unscrew . . .

  Five hours gone. Three a.m. and time for another couple of lines. Feel that blast. Time for some cleaning! A meth freak must clean: he can’t help himself. Do the toilets, the sinks, the floors, the dishes. Find some lingering dirt and do it all again. Take apart the toaster piece by piece. Dismantle the coffee maker. Read some cheap sci-fi. Weep buckets over the death of a benevolent, gerbil-like alien. Dig up some old Hustlers. Reacquaint yourself with all the girls. You’re the king of marathon masturbators. Shave off another line . . .

  The closest you come to feeling like Spider-Man, sure . . . until you don’t anymore. The downside commences. Wander for a week, looking for a broken bottle with which to slash your wrists. Listen to the ocean roar in your ears threatening to drown you in its fathoms. Don’t worry, that’s just your blood pressure screaming toward stroke levels.

  You’re smart enough not to try the needle, because you know you’ll never come back from a feeling that good. That decision saves your life.

  But you wake up a couple of years later to find your teeth are ground down a quarter inch from the gums, and you look 10 years older than you should look and people who pay attention can tell something is wrong with your eyes. All you have to show for it is a worthless stack of acrylic dragons and broadsword-swinging barbarians in your closet and a kitchen cluttered with the component parts of violated
appliances. Worst of all, your brain is different. You fear you have used up all the high you’re allotted in life. Happy people seem exotic, implausible, unfathomable. You watch them edge away from you in elevators. Your clothes are weird. You seek the dark. You’re a mole man.

  A few hours after I parted company with Munoz and Wein, my Schwinn found the strip mall on the Balboa peninsula where Moe Shanks kept his shop. I say the Schwinn found it (you’ve got to believe me) because I was not conscious of having anything to do with it. The Lawnmower Man could get me to supercool and fearless, if anybody could.

  ‘Hi, Fabulous Moe.’

  ‘Welcome, Benny,’ said Moe, tinkering with a weedwhacker as he watched me approach through neat ranks of used mowers and edgers. ‘What can I do for you?’

  I used to run on one of his West Newport crews, and in one blurry three-day stretch I did 132 lawns for him. We hadn’t seen each other for five or six years. His face seemed much older than I remembered it, and the awful auburn rug on his head made him look older still. Moe used to be some kind of an actor. On the walls hung faded headshots of obscure performers with personal salutations to Moe.

  ‘Moe,’ I said, ‘I have an important project coming up for which I’ll need some serious, serious . . .’

  ‘ Yes?’

  ‘Some pep. Some go.’

  ‘Pep and go, those toe-tapping twins!’ Moe said. ‘Matter of fact, those lovely coozes just dropped by with their manager, Mr. Chutzpah. Come back and say hi. They’ve missed you.’ And back Benny went.

  CHAPTER 18

  That night I was gnawing my lips at the Greasy Tuesday and listening to the scrape-scrape-scrape of molars in my skull, waiting for Gus to show. Here I was, second stool from the right on the far curve of the bar facing the front entrance. Sal Chamusco eyefucking me from across the room. One of his fingers in his cheek, applying cream to a canker sore. Telly the Chupacabra nowhere in sight. Look around the bar: a clutch of regulars. The typical Friday-night crowd. No one knows. Every expression familiar. Lassitude and vague menace. I was a fixture here, like the sawdust and Sal and Old Larry. Benny Bunt, one of the indigenous trolls, a mushroom as native to this dank piss-smelling cellar as any of the other human molds and fungi. Right where everyone expected me to be. Not to worry, Benny. It’s just the speed. No one knows about the police-issue brown paper bag in your pocket. No one knows about the wire strapped against the barbered swath of your sweating chest, or the men in the truck listening down the block. Just the speed. There’s no such thing as shadow people.

  Make some small-talk. Sports, current events. ‘Something eating you, Benny?’ Junior said. ‘You’re sweating. Have a napkin.’

  ‘Why the fuck should anything be eating me?’ I said. ‘I’m a regular, aren’t I? I’m here where I always am, drinking what I’m always drinking.’

  I watched Junior frowning and walking over to Sal; the two exchanging words, glancing over at me. More people eyefucking me now. I wore Gus’s bad-ass cammie jacket. But what everyone saw was the snitch jacket. I felt fear spreading between my shoulder blades. It was written back there, as clear and loud as the gaudy cursive on a bowling jacket: Benny the Snitch. In lockup, the snitch jacket put you on a moral plane with rapists and pedophiles. It made you Typhoid Mary. It was a death-mark, a bull’s-eye for any sharpened soup ladle or razor-tipped toothbrush. No: no one knows.

  ‘A helluva production,’ said a man with a combover down the bar, ‘to get over a bitch.’

  The TV glowed on his uptilted face. The screen flashed people making masks. Crazy, vivid tribal masks, beast-and-demon masks. All around California, a TV voice explained, they were ramping up for some kind of festival in the desert. The screen flashed ugly ass-naked bodies running through the sand with their hands in the air. Pixilated black dots floated over their pubes and titties. Glimpses of fires burning; a bunch of Christers protesting; a big wicker sculpture exploding like a great flaming skull; some guy saying it’s a beautiful epiphany that he circles his calendar for every year.

  ‘How do you mean,’ I said, ‘a bitch?’

  ‘How that party started,’ combover said. ‘Some schlub goes into the desert to burn his ex-girlfriend’s furniture and scream his head off over how she fucked him over, right? And now it’s ten years later and ten thousand other morons are out there with him.’

  Here was Gus. Large, incoherent beard-mumbling mass to my left reeking of liquor. Nobody eyefucking him. And now, owing to him, nobody eyefucking me. With quick, smooth motions of his lumpy fingers he started rolling smokes on the bar top, expertly pinching lines of tobacco into the rolling paper, packing them so tight and even and flat at each tip they could be mistaken for machine-made. Passing them horizontally in front of his beard with a dart of his tongue, moistening, sealing. One by one he lined them up; two spawned four; four spawned eight; a family forming. Career convict’s easy expertise at work. A task so familiar to Gus he could do it perfectly 10,000 times dead-drunk. He handed me one still moist with his saliva and I put it in my mouth.

  Turning his eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot toward me, he said, ‘You secure that thing?’

  ‘I’m meeting a guy tomorrow about it. It’s all arranged.’

  ‘Good, because the shit’s time-sensitive. We need to leave first thing the day after. There’s a narrow window here.’

  ‘You figure maybe you’ll clue me in as to what it’s all about?’

  He seemed offended by the question. His voice grew sharp and focused.

  ‘ You’re not looking at some bush-league candy-ass humper with a popgun and a pipedream,’ Gus growled, gesturing with a wave of his palm to the coterie of decayed regulars. ‘I’m not one of these. This ain’t some nigger-rigged raft going down the Mississippi, but a dreadnought, a dreadnought called the USS Fucking Miller. Black Ops! Don’t you know anything about how Black Ops works?’

  ‘Well, if we put our heads together – – ’

  ‘Not how it works! I say too much, I violate the protocols and prerogatives of the chain of command. You think in Nam they told you what the hell you were doing? You’ve gotta trust the commander. What if the enemy captures you and tortures you? When they sent Martin Sheen up the river to get Colonel Kurtz, did every asshole on the boat know what for?’

  ‘But we’re not in Vietnam, and besides – – ’

  ‘You never read up on the Gambinos? The Don never goes out and dirties his hands. He has his captains talk to the soldiers, and the soldiers talk to their underlings, and so on down the line. Buffers! So it doesn’t get traced back. See?’

  ‘But I don’t understand why – – ’

  ‘Less you know, the better. I’ve made mistakes before. I’ve told my confederates too much. They brag to some bitch, they talk in their sleep, whatever – it comes back on you, bites your ass. I’m not doing any more time because of someone else’s blunders. A professional’s always a little paranoid.’

  ‘Don’t you think I deserve – – ’

  ‘I’ve killed forty-two men, eight women and three children,’ Gus said. ‘I know what the fuck I’m doing. All you’ve gotta do is follow orders.’

  ‘I got a wife. I need to know, at least I need to know how long we’ll be gone.’

  ‘A day, two tops.’ He ordered a Bud longneck and pulled on it. I watched his thick fingers pressing against the glass of the bottle, smearing invisible fingerprint oil all over it. The enigma of his identity living on that bottle. His real name, his real past, waiting to be dusted into focus sharp and clear.

  ‘C’mon, it’ll be fucking cool,’ Gus said. ‘The road! How many people can look in the mirror and say, “I did a murder for money”? And it’s a good deed besides. Needs to be done. Trust me on that.’

  ‘What did this guy do?’

  ‘He’s an evil piece of shit, that’s what. And that’s all you need to know for now.’ Gus drank. ‘Look, you may think this is about money, but it ain’t. It’s about helping someone out of an unfixable situation. Think of it as opp
ortunity’s knock. A chance to do something you can be proud of. You know that dream you told me about once? About the train you can’t quite catch?’

  ‘Yeah . . .’

  ‘It’s me, brother, the USS Miller. It’s in the station.’

  Suddenly I felt beautiful, hearing that: felt the scales fall from my eyes, cool electricity kissing me inside and out. Then I remembered I was on a mission. I was here for intel and working for someone else, for the law. Those were my friends. Keep your head, Benny. Don’t go wiggy. Keep slipping him the questions. Ease them in. Attack from a hundred angles. Coax, manipulate, nudge: Who’s Mr. Gecko? Who wants him wasted? Why?

  An hour’s persistent headwork and I couldn’t pry loose another bastard clue. Gus impregnable. Blood from a stone.

  His last words: ‘Get that cannon. Sunday’s the show. You and me and the Lady from Bristol leave at first light.’

  Watch him lumber and weave back to his room. Slip out with the beer bottle. Now, while you can. Pay your bill. Say your good-byes. Get the fuck out. Cool stride down the length of the bar. Head for the door.

  The sudden pressure of a hand on my wrist. Attached to the hand: surly Sal Chamusco staring at me agate-eyed.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Whaddya got down there?’

  Look down. The bottleneck forming a tent in the front of my pants. Look innocent. Take out the bottle, show it to him. Say, ‘You get a nickel for ’em down at the supermarket.’

  ‘You that hard-up?’

  ‘It’s also good for the environment.’

  ‘I’m a poor, dead-ass broke motherfucker, and I’ve done just about anything you can name for a buck, but you won’t find me stooping to that. I got a little bit of pride left.’

  ‘Well, fuck you.’

  ‘ Yeah, fuck you too, Woodsy Owl. Hey, Junior, he’s stealing your bottles.’

  But I was already out the door, striding through the night toward the boxy white van around the corner where the boys sat waiting among the banks of recording machinery. The van said ‘Friendly’s Flowers’ and had a tulip on the side.