Snitch Jacket

by Christopher Goffard

  Finkel stops now in front of a window in a strip mall. A small stucco church. Under his armpit there’s a folded newspaper with the Nam Support Group ad. It’s the ad he looks for first in every new town. Instant friendship. Understanding souls ready to extend a few bucks, a job, a hot shower, a couch. And of course there’s always an audience: love in the form of a listener’s rapt attention – sometimes, strangely, the only love that feels pure and uncompromised, even as he wins it with extravagant and multilayered lies. Will this be the city where the universe gives him a sign? Will this be the place where he learns who he’s supposed to be?

  I see his blocky scum-nailed hand with its riot of faded tats, pushing open the door and leaving an imprint of oily sweat. I follow his boots as he heads inside, the wooden stairs creaking under his Army-surplus shitkickers as 300 pounds of guts and muscle descend to the basement meeting room, his belly preceding him like a heavyweight’s medicine ball. Men with yellowed fingers are already beginning to fill the circle of foldout chairs, smoking and cradling Styrofoam coffee cups. The same crowd he’s seen in a hundred such basements. Weathered smoke-leached skin, rutted faces, rheumy eyes, bandanas, the stench of underpasses and pay-by-the-hour motels. There’s a tattoo on a stringy arm that says ‘From Crank to Christ.’ The kind of men he’s known all his life: chasers of Jesus H., blow and ludes and demon weed, E and Big H and Special K, and anything else named in the Periodic Table of Human Hungers.

  Scanning their faces, Finkel realizes with a surge of outrage that at least half of them are fakes. Never saw The Shit. Probably never spent a day in the armed forces. His jaw tightens with contempt; bile rises in his throat. The gall! He’s looking at a bunch of broke-dicks who’ve botched their lives by one of the 10,000 available methods, who come for the comfort of a shared fiction, for absolution. Yeah, if the government’s dirty war had fucked their lives, put all those demons in their heads, maybe they weren’t entirely to blame. Maybe it wasn’t their fault that they slept on a slab of concrete and spent their days picking lice from each other’s scalps. You are beneath contempt, he thinks. Then he remembers that he’s a fake too. Been at it so long he sometimes forgets. His cheeks are suddenly hot with shame. He swallows, trying to put it out of his mind.

  It isn’t that Gerry Finkel lacked the stones; it isn’t as if he didn’t try to get to Southeast Asia. In this, at least, he feels superior to the other impostors. In his teens, watching broadcasts of American soldiers carried out of the jungle in body bags, he thought, ‘That’s a fine death.’ While he envied their sacrifice, he also possessed the secret conviction that the soldiers might have survived had they been more ruthless, had they refused to allow the hippies back home to sap their mojo. In those days he could close his eyes and imagine the hot weight of heavy artillery vibrating in his hands: a gorgeous snap-snap-snap-snap-snap of rounds slashing through gook foliage. Gunning down hundreds of gooks, strafing them from the air, smoking them out of their rat-tunnels, striding between their bayoneted corpses, finishing off the ones that twitched. Sometimes it was the hippies streaming over the border to Canada that he imagined himself strafing: Didn’t they give a shit about Duty? Didn’t they understand World Freedom was at stake? He understood. Once he got to the jungle, to The Shit, he’d be a model of dedication and ruthlessness. The best killer the US government ever saw. They’d put medals on his chest, maybe put his picture in a book; he’d have friends and admirers. He was 18. He dreamed of having the thousand-yard stare before his twentieth birthday.

  And then his life vaporized before him. What had been the recruiter’s name? Scandini? Monterastelli? Something Italian. He remembers standing on a busy Redondo Beach street in the hazy daylight, bodies passing in a blur while he stared in his humiliated stupor at a business card imprinted with the recruiter’s name and tried to make sense of the words the man had just told him. A man with a bum ticker is a liability out there. Standing outside the recruiting station in the bad-ass knee-length black leather jacket he wore in those days, feeling suddenly it was a ridiculous jacket, a badge of idiotic pretension, he studied that card as if it were a death warrant for a crime he didn’t know he’d committed: exiled, excommunicated, cast into outer darkness, stripped of his country’s love and of his ability to serve it with the best of his love. Murdered – yes! – murdered before he even became a man. Had a bitter life of bungled criminality been avoidable after that?

  Yes, if Finkel’s life is a botch in every particular, and he knows it is, he suspects his failures might have unfolded from that moment in the recruiter’s office. Of course, he considers further, if a man goes looking for candidates to explain his crippled soul, who lacks the luxury of multiple-choice? In moments of self-scrutiny, he sometimes reaches for the nearest napkin and lays out the possibilities:A. Genetic predispositions to depression/mood-altering chemicals

  B. Anger management/impulse control issues

  C. Bum ticker

  D. Fear of the Pussy

  E. Missing The Shit

  F. All of the above

  He circles F, then crumples the napkin and stuffs it in his jeans.

  Now Finkel sits in a church basement among other ragged men, sipping black coffee and listening as they ramble, some of them barely coherent, of napalm, sonofabitch sergeants, fragged friends, loneliness, drug habits, divorce, adjusting to The World, wretched mistreatment by the VA.

  Finkel introduces himself, says he’s passing through. He speaks slowly at first, in a voice he knows is barely audible. Tells how he always wanted to be a soldier. Got to the jungle full of piss and vinegar, drunk on John Wayne. (Murmurs of assent around the circle.) Tells how he was ambushed on long-range recon. His best friend blown up beside him . . . crazy-brave Arkansas kid named Theodore Piper. As his story mounts toward its climax, he is orating with the full range of his lungs, tears are streaming down his cheeks, and he’s staring at the big hands cupped in front of him, bellowing, ‘Teddy’s brains! His fucking brains, man! Teddy’s fucking brains!’ Several of the other men are weeping too. It’s a command performance. Quietly he sits back in his chair, shaking off the memories, feeling their love, their reverence, their pity for him and for themselves. Someone gives him a handkerchief and he says, ‘Thank you, brother. Thank you, man.’

  Finkel has barely registered the presence of the emaciated man who sits quietly across from him, his face shadowed by a baseball cap. Wan and pallid, he has a long, hard-looking, stubbled face, hooded eyes, broken Roman nose. On the lapel of his flannel shirt is a tiny peace sign.

  The man has an air of great gentleness about him, but his eyes are dead.

  ‘I’m Gus, but most of you already know me,’ he says in a soft voice when his turn comes to speak. ‘I just wanted to tell you all how much this group has meant to me. My time’s almost up. I dunno if I’ll be back next week. If I’m not, I just want to say to you all: Be good to one another. Love each other, alright?’

  The man is different from the others. The real McCoy. Finkel notices it now. Such men draw him magnetically.

  ‘Big C, huh?’ Finkel asks him after the meeting as the men file toward the street.

  Miller lifts his cap to disclose the bare lumps of his scalp. ‘Being bald’s part of the bitch of it,’ he says, smiling dimly. ‘Especially for an old cocksman who was proud of his mane. Here’s what it used to be.’

  He lets his wallet fall open on his skeletal palm. His driver’s license photo shows the same man – same hard-looking face, hooded eyes, long jaw, broken nose – only considerably younger and heavier, with thick luxuriant hair. Finkel catches the writing on the license:MILLER, GUSTAVO EMMETT

  139 E. Fischbach Court

  Phoenix, AZ

  Date of Birth July 1, 1946

  Finkel blinks at it. They have the same birthday. They both came into the world on the day the bomb fell on Bikini Atoll. He takes this as a sign. He doesn’t know what kind of sign, not yet, but he doesn’t believe such things are just coincidences. Hadn’t he been praying fo
r a message, a clue, an oracle – something? Something to tell him whether to put a bullet in his head, at long last, or wait a while longer? So he asks the vet where he was born, and it turns out they came into the world in the same Venice, California hospital. They might have shared the same nursery, laid side-by-side in it. Now they’re both intrigued. They discover further linkages. It turns out their families had lived just a couple of miles apart in Venice; turns out that Finkel’s mom, a janitor, had serviced the bowling alley that Miller’s dad had run. Both men have vivid memories of roaming the bowling alley as boys; it’s possible they even played together.

  It’s clear they must talk further. Finkel asks where in this hot, shitty city a man can get a drink. Miller says he knows a place. They climb into Miller’s Dodge. An old gray German shepherd, head resting on its forepaws, looks up savagely from its place on the floor of the van, growling belatedly at the drifter. ‘Jimmy Jingles is the world’s sorriest guard-dog,’ Miller says.

  By the time they reach the Stag, the dog is lazily licking Finkel’s hand in friendship. As the dog’s tongue passes slowly and repeatedly over Finkel’s palm, insistently tasting his sweat, his poisoned glands, his accretions of bad years, Finkel is surprised to realize he feels like weeping. He is aware of his immense loneliness. He would like a dog like this.

  Miller leaves the windows of the van cracked and they head inside to drink. He explains that he’s been a pacifist since he returned from the war. It was traceable to a specific incident. Some very bad shit. Wounded and alone in the Delta for three days and three nights, pieces of his buddies floating in the malarial puddles around him, he’d become convinced God had selected such a ghastly death for him as punishment for the killing he’d done in Nam. So he promised God that if He brought him home to The World, he wouldn’t hurt another living thing, ever.

  So he returned from that bloody shitstorm with the absolute determination never to inflict an ounce of injury. Got heavily into Zen. Became a vegetarian. Wandered a lot. Lived mostly on his VA checks and odd jobs. A couple of wives, a couple of divorces, no kids, no hard feelings. Then cancer got him. That was pretty much his life story.

  He asks Finkel where he’s keeping himself.

  ‘Loose on the streets of the world, brother,’ Finkel says. ‘I’m on borrowed time, too. Headed back to California for a last look at the sea, I guess.’ Finkel taps his chest three times with the tip of his beer and adds, ‘They’ve been telling me for twenty years the pump could crap out any minute.’

  Miller nods, and his weak hands lift his beer to his thin lips with difficulty. They talk most of the night, two doomed men on borrowed time, sharing their scarred souls – Finkel careful about what he says, careful not to expose himself as an impostor. Finkel wonders at the long odds against them meeting like this, having been born at the same place and time, only to ramble about the world on their respective ways, thousands of miles apart, suffering mightily, clawing for rare moments of grace, getting older, surviving, finally nudged together in that basement by forces that couldn’t just be chance . . .

  Miller puzzles over that and says, ‘Well, maybe it’s not so strange. We’re born in the Vietnam Era, so we’re gonna go to the jungle. And when we’re back, we’re gonna go to the vet centers. And if we’re West Coast boys, well, probably we’ll settle near home eventually, and there’s only so many of those centers in the western states. So if you think of it like that, the odds of us meeting there go way up.’

  Finkel sags a little inside, but he refuses to let go of his idea, his good and strange feeling that he is somehow situated on one of fate’s axial lines. Miller tells how his wives left him because he wouldn’t give them babies. ‘Genes,’ Miller says. ‘I don’t trust the ones they gave me. I watched my dad kill himself and my brother kill himself and my sister die of acute alcohol poisoning, and I don’t feel so terrific myself, and I decided, “I’m not passing on my warped genes to an innocent kid.” So both times I said, “I can’t, baby, I’m sorry but I can’t.” So they skipped. Who could blame them? But I’ve been flying kind of solo since, and that sucks.’

  It might be then, during that pause in the conversation, that Miller says it. Or it might be later, after a few more drinks. But sometime that night he comes out with it: ‘I got friends in California. How about we head that way together?’

  (Scratch that. It’s Finkel’s idea. Yes. He’s an angler for advantages, after all. He needs a ride; he connives to get one. Maybe makes Miller think the idea is his own.)

  They’ll take the scenic route, hit some bars on the way there. That’s the plan. There are a few great dives in LA and Orange County, Miller says, that he has a yen to revisit one last time. ‘Funny to see if they’re still telling stories about me,’ Miller says.

  ‘What kind of stories?’

  ‘I was supposed to be some major bad-ass,’ Miller says, and the recollection seems to amuse him. ‘They called me Mad Dog Miller. I chewed eyes out of people’s skulls and picked my teeth with their bones. Can you believe that?’

  The thing of it was, he explains, he came back from Nam a changed man, a man who had thrown down his sword. He had the thousand-yard stare, sure; he was big and ripped and hard-looking; he swaggered, a walking provocation to the toughs. But he was a man who had lost the physical and mental ability to inflict harm on other human beings. It was more than the promise to God. The thought of doing violence made him physically ill. Even if he’d wanted to, he could not throw a punch. A man might swing on him, and he’d just take it. It was a dangerous character trait to bring into the dives he frequented. One of his favorite places, a bar in Costa Mesa run by a Nam buddy of his, Dorsey, was particularly rough. Numbers guys, shylocks, professional arm-breakers. Dudes pulling knives over nothing at all. You might get stabbed for taking the last peanut from the bowl or for blowing your smoke in the wrong direction. So to protect him, his pal Dorsey – good old Dorsey – started calling him Mad Dog Miller and let people guess where the name came from. Soon he was being spoken of as a berserker killer, a time bomb, practically a cannibal. The stories spread and multiplied and sprouted spontaneous appendages, the regulars vying to outdo each other with tales of violent madness they had personally witnessed Mad Dog perpetrate. Which allowed the man who wouldn’t, couldn’t throw a punch to drink without threat, while the legends around him grew.

  (Finkel files this away. His brain does it automatically, with no immediate notion of how it might benefit him. A seeker after angles, advantages. Years of practice. A snitch can tell you: you never know how a dollop of random information might come in handy.)

  That night, Miller opens the foldout sofa in his one-bedroom apartment and puts some sheets on it for Finkel. At the kitchen table they share a Stouffer’s microwave pizza, a Coors 12-pack, and a fat Oregonian blunt. The place is filthy. Miller refuses to kill the bugs. Finkel watches as he corners a lizard and, rather than kill it, carefully carries it outside in his quivering cupped palms.

  ‘You don’t molest God’s creatures,’ responds Miller. ‘Not when you’re this close to meeting Him. Whatever you want from the fridge, take it. We’ll hit the road tomorrow.’ He disappears down the hall to his bedroom, the dog lurching alongside his master’s slow, shuffling slippers.

  Alone in the living room, the mattress sagging under his bulk, Finkel listens to Miller’s tortured breathing from the next room and wonders what his being here signifies, what he’s being called on to do. Then he’s convinced meeting Miller is a pointless accident, signifying nothing except the universe’s cold sense of humor, its way of disguising randomness in significant-seeming get-up, mockingly sending you what looked like a scrap of meaning, a Virgin Mary on a tortilla, and watching you scrabble hungrily for it, only to reinforce your utter adriftness, your worthless aloneness. Finkel decides: Fuck it, I’ll just steal his van and get out. After chewing it over, he decides finally against it: mystic link or no, the man had taken him in, done him a kindness. And he could use the guy’s company. />
  In his dreams that night, Finkel has a vision of them being swapped at birth, of doctors stealing his strong good heart and giving it to Miller, blessing him with it; of doctors snatching Miller’s bum baby ticker and planting it in Finkel’s own chest, cursing him with it. Yes, somehow Miller had stolen his life, took the body that was rightfully his and the war experiences that were rightfully his, consigning him to a shadow-life, a gelded, squishy half-life.

  Sometime during the night, Finkel wakes to sense Miller near him in the dark.

  As his eyes adjust, he perceives Miller sitting several feet away on a foldout chair, facing him, his head in his hands. From time to time he can hear Miller sobbing softly. Finkel doesn’t know what to say. He sits up slowly and listens to the choked sobs, realizing that Miller has left his breathing apparatus in his room. Finally Miller says, ‘Look, I’m pretty much a lone wolf, and . . . And I’m real close and . . . I got to thinking you were right about being sent here . . . And, look, I know it’s unorthodox, but . . . maybe if . . . some human contact . . .’

  Finkel hears himself roar, ‘I dunno what you take me for, but my faggotry’s strictly situational. Strictly in the joint, where it don’t count.’

  Miller lowers his head dejectedly, shaking it slowly from side to side, aware that he misjudged his guest. ‘That ain’t what I had in mind. I’m just askin’ not to die alone, brother. I’m sorry.’

  Miller starts to get up, to return to his room, when Finkel walks over and puts his hands on the man’s sharp-boned shoulders. He carries him, all bones, no more than a hundred pounds, and sets him down on the mattress. He holds him all night, Miller sobbing and shuddering against Finkel’s chest, babbling ancient nightmares of jungle and monsoons and pieces of friends bobbing on malarial puddles, before going quiet and still . . .