Snitch World (4 page)

Klinger nodded. “And sin.” He nodded again.

The old man lifted his glass. “And sin, brother.”

They toasted and drank.

“So every now and again, while this guy is telling this goddamn endless story, he’d reach over and pluck up the shot glass with two fingers, like this. And he’d lift it over the peghead of the guitar and around the shoulder strap and take a sip, like this.” The old man demonstrated the move. “Then he’d put it back, dead center on the second stool. And the whole time he’d never take his eyes off the audience. Not once. By and by,” he continued, as he set down his own drink, “the tequila was gone. But the goddamn story continued. Two or three times he’d reach over for the glass, never taking his eyes off the audience, lift it to his lips, find it was empty, betray not a whit about the discovery, set the glass back down again, and go on with his goddamn story.”

“What was this story about, anyway?” Klinger thought to ask.

“The good old days in Greenwich Village. Is there some other subject?”

“I don’t know.” Klinger looked at him. “Never been there.”

“Well, see? What do you know?” the old man nodded. “By and by, some friend of this guitarist sneaks up behind him and takes the glass, thinking to help him out by fetching a refill.”

“Now there’s a friend.”

“A woman, actually,” the old man recollected. “Pretty thing.”

“It’s always a woman.”

“There’s a lot to that not growing up stuff,” the old man agreed. “More than meets the eye.”

“Sounds to me like it’s nothing but what meets the eye.” “There’s a point in there somewhere, I’m sure,” the old man said, somewhat frostily.

“My point exactly,” Klinger replied pointedly.

“But the bartender,” the old man persevered, “who is annoyed that his musical evening is turning into a therapy session run by a drunk, tells the young lady that her friend is cut off until he takes the trouble to do what he’s being paid to do, which is sing and play the songs for which he’s famous and which changed the world for the better back when we was all hippies.”

“Speak for yourself,” Klinger advised him tartly.

“I am,” said the old man. “So, naturally, she waits. By and by …” The old man snapped his fingers. They didn’t quite snap, so he snapped them a second time. “Our guitarist does it again.”

“He reaches over—.”

“—and makes as if to pinch up the shot glass.”

”But the shot glass isn’t there.”

“He doesn’t turn a hair.”

“I’ll bet he twitched internally.”

“Actually, the twitch was quite visible.”

“Didn’t he look over at the second stool, just the least glance, to make sure he hadn’t missed?”

“Nope. He knew it wasn’t there. So, he draped the unemployed hand on the neck of his guitar and went back to his story.”

“This sounds excruciating,” Klinger said.

“It was that,” the old man agreed, “but it was raining too hard to leave gracefully.”

“So …”

“So, by and by, he does it again.”

“He reaches over—.”

“—And makes as if to pinch up the shot glass between thumb and middle finger.”

“Which still isn’t there.”

“Which he had forgotten.”

“Or was expecting to arrive at any moment.”

“Either way, we had to watch him repeat this performance three or four times before somebody finally yelled out for him to shut up and play us a tune. That’s when it got pathetic.”

“It’s been sounding pathetic to me for some time.”

“‘I can’t,’ the guitarist told us, and he clasped his picking hand to his throat. ‘I’m parched.’”

Klinger had no snappy retort for this.

“A silence descended on the whole room,” the old man said. “There was fifteen or twenty people packed in there, not counting a pool table, but at that moment you could hear a burrito going round and round in the microwave behind the bar.”

“Pretty quiet,” Klinger allowed.

“The bartender relented and the girl delivered our guitarist his shot. He made a point of downing it in one go. Then he set the empty down, dead center on the stool, and proceeded to play and sing the prettiest, saddest, loneliest ballad you ever heard. He wrote it, too. And he buzzed not a string, forgot not a lyric. He even yodeled at the end. Real plaintive.”

Klinger and the old man weren’t the only people in the present-tense barroom, but now a silence descended over this one, too.

“It was enough to tear your heart out. Two or three women in the crowd started cryin’. I’m not makin’ this up. When he finished, the damn bartender bought a round on the house.”

“If I pulled a stunt like that,” the present-tense bartender declared, “I’d be out on the street with the rest of you bums.”

“But we’d be brothers,” the old man suggested.

“Until the time came for the next drink,” the bartender suggested.

“All of about fifteen minutes,” the old man agreed. “Brotherhood is volatile,” Klinger observed, thinking the while of Chainbang’s attempt to cheat him out of his cut. “Say,” Klinger said aloud, “anybody seen today’s
Chronicle
?”

“There’s one right here,” the bartender said, handing one over the bar. “No Sports Section.”

“Organized sports pave the road to fascism,” the old man said.

Klinger frowned. “Haven’t I read that somewhere?” The old man looked at Klinger, then shook his head. “I seriously fucking doubt it.”

Klinger quickly perused the Metro section. He found no mention of a liquor store clerk getting himself killed in
the course of a robbery. Nor of a subsequent arrest in the middle of Webster Street. This brightened Klinger’s outlook considerably. “Say,” he said, “how about another round?”

The bartender poured. “This one’s on me. That was a good story.”

“Well I’ll be damned,” Klinger said, genuinely touched. “Thanks.”

“It’s that kinda joint,” the old man said, not without satisfaction. “So what if it’s in the Tenderloin?”

“So,” said Klinger, after the first sip of his fourth drink. “What happened to that genius old drunk, anyway?”

The old man regarded the shimmer atop his refreshed whiskey. “He quit drinking,” he finally said.

“Really?” said Klinger.

“Really?” said the bartender.

“Yep,” the old man affirmed. He lifted his glass and toasted the room. “Then he died.”

It’s like some monotheistic entity damned me to a thousand years of insomnia, Klinger thought, just to demonstrate that he has the juice. There can be no other reason. I’m just not important enough to—. I’ve got to get some sleep.

After any number of convivialities, free drinks, matched rounds, spillage, and forgotten knee-jerk quaffs, Klinger got out of the bar with $57.32 of the $120 he’d entered with, as drunk as a man of high rank in a feudal society, which he was not.

Out the front door of the Hawse Hole a racetrack turn launched him up one flight of stairs into the lobby of the Tuolumne Meadows Residential Hotel. Against a blown-up backdrop of a Hetch Hetchy Valley photographed before the O’Shaughnessy Dam turned it into a reservoir in 1923, five years after the hotel itself was subdivided into ten by twelve rooms intended to accommodate merchant seamen returning from World War I, a sleepy clerk took $51.42 cash up front for three nights’ stay, leaving Klinger with $5.89 mad money, in exchange for which he received a key bound by a beaded chain to a plastic one-inch fisherman’s anchor.

“Up three flights, take the hall to your left, Room 335. The moaner two doors down is a permanent resident, so I don’t wanna hear about it.”

Klinger stared at the key. “Three-thirty-five,” he repeated. His breath came with some difficulty and not a little audibly.

Having resumed his seat behind the counter, the clerk took up a large pair of tailor’s shears. “Right in one.” Without sparing another glance for Klinger, he resumed his close perusal of a celebrity magazine, open on the desk before him.

“Moaner,” Klinger repeated. “Moaner …”

“He doesn’t go on all night, as a rule,” the clerk said, as the twin blades of his shears carefully limned a starlet’s gam. He moved the back of his head toward a clock on the wall behind him, which had twelve Chinese ideograms on its face. “It’s already late.”

“Already late,” Klinger repeated stupidly. Existentially, as he might have enunciated if he possessed breath sufficient to the task, it’s never been so Late as it is Now. If I just had another drink …

“Run along,” the clerk suggested. The tips of his shears nipped the image of the actress just between arm and ribcage.

Run
, Klinger was thinking to himself, as he bounced off the farther wall of the stairwell. As if with languor he arrested his rebound by clinging to the banister with both hands.
Run home.

The room, once achieved, seemed hardly worth the effort. There was a window, nailed shut. There was a radiator, cold as a dead man’s armor. If they ever find the entropic core of the universe, Klinger mused, it’s going to turn out to be a lump of cast iron beneath a window that can’t be opened, and I’ll be in there with it. The floor had been carpeted wall to wall a long time ago, but now its polyester fibers yearned an inch or two into the foetid troposphere like hairs in the mouth of a feeding anemone—Take it easy, Klinger told himself, it’s just threadbare carpet. Merely sordid. Nothing new. Nothing terrible. Plus it’s dry in here. There’s a roof. There’s a lock on the door …

A moan came through the wall. A cry between unheard sobs, maybe. Nothing out of the ordinary.

The bedding appeared to be clean, a small miracle, until he peeled back the blanket to discover an uncommonly long pubic hair dead center on the sheet. Flicked by thumb and forefinger, the hair scampered across the sheet and disappeared over the far edge.

As if possessed by a suicidal animation, that hair, thought Klinger, and he proceeded to get lost and found in his own shirt. I like that. I endorse suicidal animation.

The pillow smelled like the driver’s seat in the oldest bus in the transcontinental fleet, but Klinger hit it face down and paid the odor no mind. With suicidal animation his sense of collective identity fled in the wake of the multi-cornered hair, over the edge of consciousness and into the seething abyss of the universal, non-internet id.

Wherein, though it be a mere blighted star in a galaxy of predominant neuropathies, every mind continues to twinkle. In this case the mind of Klinger ginned up a full-blown parable complete with sights, sounds, smells—altogether haunting tactilities, to wit:

Chainbang, spawn of Amerindian-Chinese ancestry, convinces Klinger that if they could scare up the means to score a pair of bus tickets to Leadville, Colorado, they could make their fortunes.

“My forbears all had shovel teeth,” Chang Yin tells him, opening his mouth. “Put your fingers in my mouth—here. Touch the roof behind the incisors.” Klinger does so. The two top incisors launch backward into Chang Yin’s mouth like upside down water slides. “Melungeon tri-racial isolate,” Chang Yin says around Klinger’s fingers. “Could be Mongolian, could be Choctaw, hey—,” he snatches Klinger’s wrist, pulling the fingers out of his mouth and twists. “Could be miscegenatin’ Appalachian peckerwood.”

”Okay, okay …” says Klinger. “The fuck difference … this swarm …” He bats the air in front of his face.

After a lot of fooling around which consumes a molar volume of oneiric neurons, Chainbang reverts to his given name of Chang Yin for the purposes of this venture and perhaps in order to evade detection by Interpol, as he and Klinger materialize down the three front steps of a mystical Greyhound bus eastbound from Salt Lake City—picks, headlamps, thermal underwear, hickory shirts, gum boots, and galluses all packed into army surplus rucksacks, canteens and enameled cups clanking—in front of the snow-bound US Post Office in Leadville, Colorado.

No hotel, no steak and eggs breakfast, no nervous glass of whiskey populate the dream—its hapless denizens go straight to work. The portal to which is a cutbank below Highway 24, a quarter mile south of the town limits. Chang Yin knows the way. Chang Yin’s ancestors on his father’s side had been imported to Leadville and the surrounding areas to dig the mines, as they had throughout the developing West in the nineteenth century, to dig for gold, silver, and many other minerals—the largest molybdenum mine in the western hemisphere is just a few miles north of Leadville—and these ancestors had handed down to select progeny their knowledge of the local mines, tunnels, claims, discoveries—and lost treasures, of course—all of which is explained to Klinger in a single intense packet burst of simultaneous awareness.

In their zeal for discovery and for the freedom rumored to be purchasable with cold cash, Chang Yin’s ancestors secretly honeycombed all the hills surrounding any meaningful claim or strike throughout the mineral West, Leadville prime among them. The town and its surrounding hills are a warren of impromptu tunnels and exploratory digs, as any number of collapsed carport slabs,
well bores, and septic tank excavations regularly attest. Few if any of these burrowings were properly shored. Many of them are partially or completely caved in. It is illegal to enter them and it is illegal to remove any material from them—not because anybody cares whether autonomous miners die or not, but because somebody owns every cubic inch of mineral rights for as far as the eye can or cannot see, whether they trouble to exploit these rights or not.

But that didn’t stop Chang Yin’s father and his father’s best friend, one Steamboat Burton, from the odd underground foray, and, though nobody ever explicitly stated as much, rarely had they not returned with a nugget or two sufficient to ease the family through the next couple of frigid months above ground. This was the knowledge that Chang Yin Sr. had passed on to Chang Yin Jr. Here is the entrance, son. Here is what a nugget looks like in the wild. There’s always one around that other people have missed if you know what to look for. Only Chinese people have the nerve to go into these tunnels, and there’s not so many of us around here anymore. Don’t tell anybody what I’ve told you, and, always remember, respect the earth, wear a helmet, carry extra batteries, don’t go alone, and don’t go too deep.