Snitch Jacket

by Christopher Goffard

  ‘I don’t think they take the handicapped,’ I said.

  ‘My deformity mirrors what’s inside me,’ said Gecko. ‘I know what you’re thinking – this guy’s grotesque. You’re thinking, “Someone shoulda slammed that thing against a wall or left it on a mountain when it was born.” I can face the truth about myself. I’m an abomination. Go ahead, say it. Say it!’

  ‘Abomifuckingnation,’ I said.

  ‘I’m like that monster in The Fantastic Four,’ said Gecko. ‘The Human Thing? A great big rocky orange dude who got all fucked up falling into a nuclear dump. Now he’s just a walking rock, a total misfit. It’s a brilliant metaphor for being outside the mainstream, for a poet’s alienation, a poet’s basic stance on things . . .’

  ‘The Thing,’ I said.

  ‘And this lumpy guy, he just wants to be like everyone else,’ said Gecko. ‘Except it’s his very freakishness that gives him superpowers. See? His very deformity that leads people to worship him. What’d you say?’

  ‘His name’s the Thing, not the Human Thing,’ I said. ‘And it was space rays that made him that way. Got him on a rocket flight.’

  Muscles twitched in Gecko’s face. His eyes went about 100 degrees colder, fixing on me. ‘That doesn’t change what I’m saying one iota, does it?’ he said. ‘I’m talking about a metaphor. You know what that is? Maybe you’ve got some observations about the creative process, from having lived it, that you can enlighten us with? The fucking cauldron, the fucking demons?’

  I didn’t know what he was talking about, so I didn’t say anything, and I could tell Gus wanted me to shut up anyway, let him do the work. ‘My friend here,’ Gus said, ‘he’s got a mouth. Sometimes it needs a smack.’

  ‘Whatever,’ said Gecko. ‘He’s with you, so I respect him.’

  ‘See these?’ said Gus, touching one of the ears on his necklace. ‘This is what the fat old war pigs reduced me to doing.’

  ‘I heard about that,’ said Gecko. ‘I mean, total dehumanization. Total.’

  ‘That’s right. You ever wondered what a human body smells like when it burns?’

  ‘It is horrific?’ said Gecko, leaning forward.

  ‘I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since ’69,’ said Gus. ‘We were on long-range patrol. Monsoon season. VC everywhere . . .’

  Gus’s voice rose and fell, grunting, bellowing war stories, getting them jumbled, railing on until abruptly he stopped, as if realizing why he was here.

  An awkward silence set in until Gecko said, ‘Have I introduced you to Cloe?’ He nodded toward the girl. ‘She’s my muse. My queen. My life force. She makes it all possible.’

  She wore no expression. She was trading bong hits with a skinny, incredibly handsome cocoa-colored dude.

  ‘This is Marvin, her latest friend,’ said Gecko. ‘They delight in humiliating me with the spectacle of their passion.’

  ‘He has to put himself into a totally impossible state to write anything,’ the girl said in my direction. ‘Mostly that means making himself sick with jealousy. No puke, no poems.’

  ‘Well, that’s my intensity,’ boasted Gecko. ‘You have to understand the creative process. No poems ever came out of a soul like a placid lake. I need the churning, I need the turmoil. Suffering is art’s crucible.’

  Suck up, Benny – here’s your chance. ‘Like Caruso on NYPD Blue,’ I said. ‘A poet of the screen. Everyone on the set hated him. Why? He was too intense for them. And now? Season One is legendary.’

  Gecko ignored me and said, ‘Why do you think poets have the shortest life expectancy of any creative type? Studies show: sixty-two years average. Shorter than novelists, way shorter than writers of non-fiction.’ He said this last word with the disgust of a Presbyterian minister saying ‘cunnilingus.’

  ‘Consult the stats, man: I’m doomed. Even though any poet who makes it to sixty is a dead relic anyway, in my eyes.’ He added: ‘I have no respect for that.’

  ‘You should take your medication, Matt,’ the girl told Gecko.

  ‘I hate it. I can’t feel anything. It’s like I disappear when I’m on it.’

  ‘You’re gonna disappear if you’re not on it.’

  ‘I need to feel something, even if it fucks me up. As long as it’s not numbness. Like the android Arnold Schwarzenegger played in Blade Runner. Where he sticks the railroad spike in his hand just so he can feel alive, feel what it is to be human?’

  ‘It wasn’t Arnold,’ I said. ‘It was Rutger Hauer. Arnold was in The Terminator. Which was stolen from The Outer Limits.’

  Gecko sneered in my direction, basilisk-cold, and said, ‘Who is this guy?’

  ‘He should shut his trap is who he is,’ said Gus. ‘Just someone I picked up. A tag-along.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Gecko, nodding slowly. ‘Sure. Guys like us, Iceman — we’re magnets, aren’t we? Magnetized. Voyeurs, hangers-on – helpless before our pull. They want to be one with us. They want us to save them. People born without it, they like to be close to those who possess it. “It,” you know? Whatever “It” is. But in the end, if we let them, they’ll suck the life out of us. Because they’re psychic vampires. Like that toady of yours, hanging around like shit on your shoes. I need to piss.’

  Gecko lifted himself off his wheelchair, unfolding a pair of long, perfectly workable legs and strolling out of the tent. The shrivelly rubber legs still dangled from the empty wheelchair. When he returned, I said, ‘ You’re just a dress-up freak. You’re not even a bona fide gimp!’

  ‘Right about now,’ added Gus, ‘I have to admit I’m feeling kind of screwed and betrayed. After pouring out my guts and troubles.’

  ‘I’m a card-carrying misfit,’ said Gecko. ‘Just because I was born with limbs doesn’t mean I’m any less an outsider. Don’t judge me by a genetic accident. Gecko’s my doppelgänger. He’s everything I am on the inside. A perpetually humiliated, debased character. Condemned to watch helplessly as the woman he loves betrays him, over and over . . .’

  The girl threw a quick sideways glance at the handsome cocoa dude, then stared fixedly at the ground. She sat with her arms crossed, as if protecting herself from a chill wind no one else could feel. I thought I heard her tell Gecko, ‘Please,’ under her breath. ‘I love you. Please . . .’ Begging.

  I noticed the tent had emptied, save for the Gecko, his girl, the cocoa dude, Gus and myself.

  ‘In moments of clarity,’ said Gecko, pulling the tent’s canvas flap shut, ‘I realize that I’m not really in love with her. Being an artist, I’m in love with a blank slate onto which I’ve projected my fantasies. The beloved becomes a kind of canvas on which one works. The artist is forever using his own soul as a laboratory, combining combustible elements. If you’ve ever studied the artistic temperament, you’ll recognize the phenomenon. The appetite for self-delusion is endless.’

  After a while the girl closed her eyes and let the cocoa dude climb on top of her. All through it she barely moved. Under her breath I could hear her singing the Beatles song about the octopus who makes his garden under the sea. Tears streamed down Gecko’s face as he watched and typed furiously on his PowerBook.

  CHAPTER 24

  Night cloaked the desert now and the wind outside was picking up and screeching like a wounded animal over the sands and pounding the sides of the tent, ruffling the canvas thwap-thwap-thwap, thwap-thwap-thwap. Through a little air-vent in the tent needle-bursts of sand blew in. I could hear row after row of freaks trooping by outside, beginning to gather at the Head for the coming Burn . . .

  Inside, the tent was thick with smoke from a big tiki-torch Gecko had lit, and his face flickered yellow and anguished in the flame. He was back in his wheelchair, in his gimp-outfit, bent over his PowerBook, oblivious to Gus and me, typing maniacally and occasionally swigging from his water bottle while those rubber limbs dangled in front of him. Now and then his brow knotted violently and he muttered a string of curses; other times he whimpered, shuddered, and shook his head over the
screen . . .

  ‘I told Marvin I’d meet him for the Burn,’ said the girl, wrapping herself in a blanket against the chill. ‘It’s in five. Are you coming?’

  ‘Pathetic,’ said Gecko without looking up.

  ‘You’re protesting the Burn too?’

  ‘Go join the lemmings, you lemming! Go ahead! You were always one of them, anyway! Just a common backstabbing slut lemming!’

  The girl ducked through the flap and disappeared, leaving us alone with Gecko, the chill deepening in my bones minute by minute and the smoke dribbling up black from the tiki-torch, stinging my lungs, making everything around me hazy, Gecko’s face writhing slowly in the shadows, and back there in the corner of the tent, big, unmoving, breathing hard, Mad Dog Miller in his mask waiting for his bone . . .

  In the desert legions of voices were rising and falling, begging for fire, the Burn imminent, Gus probing for his piece beneath the great swell of his belly, Gecko looking up finally and in a voice fearful but resigned said, ‘They sent you, didn’t they?’

  ‘Burn the Head! Burn the Head! Burn the Head!’ cried the freaks outside.

  Suddenly I felt the weight of the Smith & Wesson in my hand. Gus’s mask was off and his big face was wretched with failed nerve. His eyes pleaded with me, ashamed. They said: Now you know why I brought you. Because I was afraid I couldn’t.

  I stared stupidly at the gun sticking out of my fist for what might have been a second or an hour. From behind his PowerBook, Gecko’s puffed, watery face glared at me with sudden respect, with terror, and the new dynamic was not completely unsatisfying. Then he flung himself at me head-first. Light exploded behind my eyes, and I was on my back, and the gun was out of my hand, and I felt his fingers scrabbling for my eyeballs as we thrashed. We tumbled into Gus’s shins and the big man’s whole brick-avalanche mass crashed down on top of us, pinning us both. Then there was a chaos of limbs, teeth and nails and elbows, all of us thrashing – Gus face-down trying to right himself, Gecko screaming, Benny screaming, freaks outside screaming, the wind leaving me, a terrific pain blasting up from below, someone’s knee in my groin, all of us tangled and trying to extricate ourselves. Then, somehow, Gus’s leg was splayed over Gecko’s chest, the convict presenting the poet with the bowie knife in his boot. Gecko was not about to ignore such a gift; he unsheathed it and started hacking the air wildly; and as Gus rose to one knee, the blade slashed across his eyes.

  ‘BURN BURN BURN! BURN BURN BURN!’

  Gus struggled howling to his feet, staggered into the tent wall and brought down a section of the roof. He careened about the tent, hands clapped over his face, fat fingers glistening with blood like black ink, his mouth open in a roar dwarfed by the din.

  ‘BURN BURN BURN! BURNBURNBURNBURNBURN — — ’

  Gus caught fire then; the torch-flame must have touched his shirt – it started with one small tongue jumping from his back, and then a moment later it had multiplied and his whole body was crawling with flame, his hair, his hands, his beard, the old sauce-head could have been sweating kerosene for as fast as he went up, and he crashed blindly through the tent flap into the desert.

  Through the smoke Gecko lunged at me knife-first and I scrambled for the gun, which I had forgotten was supposed to be useless. Then it was in my hand and I squeezed it and felt the kick shudder through my arm. Gecko dropped to his hands and knees. I could see liquid dripping from his mid-section. He craned his head to look at me, his lip petulant. He crawled across the floor, groping with absurd tenacity not for the dropped knife but for his water bottle, as if a good draught would save him, dissolve the burning lead in his abdomen, erase the world’s hypocrisies and diddling priests and vanilla-soul posers, fix everything.

  ‘BURN BURN BURN! BURN BURN BURN! BURN BURN BURN!’

  From the desert there came a tremendous roar of joy.

  I ran through the ghost town of empty tents and abandoned slagheaps smoldering in the sand, while behind me the Head crackled and splintered and all the freaks bellowed ecstatically, and I thought I heard a strain of horror – hysterical horror – rising and falling among the other screams.

  Then I was bumping over the desert in the Dodge, and there was blood on the driver’s side window where I smashed it with a rock in my fist, blood all over my shirt, blood on the seat beside me, except it was not mine, most of this blood was not mine, and all the way out of the desert I watched the tower of flame burning and diminishing in the rearview. The gun was gone; I must have dropped it. Blank rounds, Munoz had said. Safe as a squirtgun. No one gets hurt. But there had been a mistake somewhere, a definite fuck-up somewhere, because a real round had gone into Gecko’s real gut and splattered real blood. Had the gun Gus handed me been the one I’d handed him? Had Gus brought a real one, one he’d had all along? Blank rounds, Benny, safe as a squirtgun . . .

  On a highway, going somewhere, black desert flying past, and there must have been an ocean nearby, because after a while all I heard was the sound of water rising and crashing in my ears – thoom thoomthoom thoomthoom thoom.

  I fled the desert, driving all night. As the sun came up I watched the road bulging through mile after mile of terrifyingly serene, sun-dappled grids of apples and grapes and artichokes, and I kept all the windows open to dispel the scent of my friend, which seemed to saturate the van — his boozy, smoky, sweaty-bigman’s stink living on in the upholstery and the dash, and the dead dog’s fart-foul stench living on too, two ghosts and their murderer trapped on a pirate ship, and the gibbering in my head unceasing:

  Why didn’t you save yourself? Why didn’t you stop, drop and roll, you sonofabitch?

  Because you sensed an opportunity, that’s why. An unexpected little gift from the universe, a chance to sear yourself like a scar into all those skulls. A little piece of you living on in 12,000 nightmares . . .

  No: ridiculous . . . you didn’t want to die . . .

  I kept looking in the rearview mirror and it was a long time before I became conscious of what was drawing my attention. There: Gus’s waist-high freezer, half concealed behind the van’s junk.

  The freezer he slept beside, there in his room at the bar.

  Which he’d been carrying with him the day he arrived.

  Which he always kept locked.

  I had to pull over to catch my breath.

  I dragged the freezer into the desert and fished a mallet from the van and busted open the padlock with three square blows. I smoked three or four cigarettes, standing there, looking at the closed lid. After a while I opened it.

  The guy inside was squeezing his knees up against his chest, like an Inca sunk into a mountainside grave. He was bald and missing his eyebrows and sunken-cheeked, but he looked peaceful. The tattoo on his arm said ‘173rd.’

  CHAPTER 25

  In the movies a dying man holds up his finger and says, ‘Wait, Bonehand – stand down a minute,’ and death obeys, allowing the nearly departed to explicate the burning mysteries that surround his life.

  A man props himself on his elbow and generously clears it all up, even as the last of his blood soaks into the dirt; he can always find a few minutes for his listeners; death doesn’t begrudge him that much.

  In real life, the dead decamp with their secrets. People are greedy that way. They don’t want to clear anything up, not even their real names.

  He called himself Gus, but his name wasn’t Gus. It wasn’t Evel Sanders, Quentin W. Cash, or Dale Delacroix, either. And it certainly wasn’t the Iceman. The ink on his arm gave as accurate a tag as any: Hardluck Bastard. But Gerry Finkel was anyone’s best guess at his real name.

  How Gerry Finkel, the drifter, came to meet the Vietnam vet, Gus Miller – and how he came to steal his name – are problems I’ve run through my mind a thousand times.

  All I had were a handful of clues, retrieved from the intestines of the van, arrayed before me on the coverlet of a Motel Six mattress somewhere in California’s Central Valley.

  A medical examiner can determine
a lot, studying the digestive tract of the dead: what he ate, when he ate. A poor man in a fairy tale slits a fish-belly to find an Arabian ruby. So what did I find in the Dodge’s teeming bowels? What did it gobble, on its travels? What gems did those musty guts yield?

  A peace button.

  A dogpiss-yellow section of the Arizona Republic, dated two summers back, which contained an ad circled by red pen in the classifieds: Vietnam Vets Support Group 6 p.m. – All Welcome.

  A matchbook from a Phoenix bar called the Stag.

  A snapshot of a gaunt, sick-looking man sitting on a couch, his eyes dead, his smile weak, his face exactly that of the man in the freezer.

  A driver’s license bearing the same man’s face, identifying him as Gustavo Emmett Miller of Fischbach Court in Phoenix.

  A dog collar that read ‘Jimmy Jingles.’

  A multiple-choice questionnaire, scribbled on a cafeteria napkin, detailing a life gone amuck.

  All these objects trying to link themselves together, trying to magnetize, trying to tell me a story.

  If I closed my eyes and concentrated I could see my friend taking shape, a big, shaggy figure in a cammie jacket lumbering down the streets of downtown Phoenix with a rucksack slung over his shoulder. It’s a mean, sprawling, furnace-hot town, the latest of 20 or 30 cities he’s drifted through in the last decade, working his way steadily from the eastern states to the West Coast.

  Only recently has Finkel become aware of his trajectory; his unconscious has been steering him inexorably west for years, one hitched ride and odd job and jail stint after another. He remembers the salt smell of the Pacific, the ocean he grew up alongside, and finds himself aching to smell it again. Sometimes he thinks of the ocean as Hope; other times he’s certain it will be the place he snuffs himself. He’s in no hurry to get there – knows, in fact, that he’s afraid to arrive. Because what if the ocean holds no magic at all? What if he finds himself standing before all that cold beautiful blue, aware that nothing’s changed, that he’s still trapped in a bloated body with a bum ticker, a poisoned liver, and a tired, sick soul? What if Hope’s just a lie he keeps telling himself? No choice left, then. Head into the surf and keep walking.