Joe Gores - Menaced Assassin

I clear my throat, but there is nothing in my throat except the sound of his voice. I wish I had been old enough to go to Vietnam, see who I was, what I had. He nods as if I have spoken.

“Agent Orange,” he says. I have never heard of Agent Orange. I am nineteen years old. “Why I got me this voice.” He raises the beer I have bought him. “Dead gooks,” he says.

We drink to dead gooks. He puts his glass down.

“We pack hogs. Cut their throats and hang them upside down on a conveyor. The bristles don’t get used for brushes any more, so we take ’em off with acid. Whole hog except the head gets dipped in the vat.”

He waits as the bartender brings us our beers. He is nodding to himself and drumming on the bar with the fingers of both hands the whole while. He drinks beer.

“If the acid gets under the skin, it’ll ruin the meat.”

“But if the head doesn’t go in, how could the acid get-”

“The other end does.”

I sit for a long moment with him, then, as I assimilate what he is telling me, I drain my beer just as he drained his.

“Yeah,” he says. “For eight fucking hours a day I shove corks up the assholes of dead pigs.”

Late as it is and drunk as I get before the 1:00 a.m. bar-close, I drive on out of Austin. I pull off the road somewhere on the way to Albert Lea, throw up the night’s beer into a clump of willows, and sleep in my sleeping bag beside the car.

I do not know if his story is true, but in the casual hour of our acquaintance he does not strike me as a fanciful man. A proud man, with nothing in his life to be proud of-back then, Vietnam vets are denied their public due-but not fanciful.

So you see, I kill for existential reasons-if you can intuit the deductive validity of my argument.

I grow as long-winded as Will. You wish only to know why I kill the Mafia underboss the newspapers call the Spic.

What can I tell you? It is mere butchery, anyone could do it, not really my sort of thing at all. I have had no bad dreams about it, so my nightmare after Lenington was naught but aberration. Perhaps I et a bad oyster-remember that line by a drunken and delicious Kay Kendall in Les Girls?

But I digress. Two days after the Spic’s assassination, I chance to read a one-inch piece about it in the New York Times, one of those much thinner editions distributed outside the five boroughs. Reading of it after the fact makes me feel strange-no, I am not going to tell you in which city or hamlet I read it. I do not wish you to know where these feats might take me; and tonight, after I end Will Dalton’s miserable existence, it will be, as Stepin Fetchit used to say, Feets, Do Yo Stuff.

Since Spic Madrid is Chicano, an Hispanic voice sings my song of death to Stagnaro’s answering machine. I discover the voice at the mission church five miles down the road. He is happy to read my little note into the telephone. He thinks it harmless fun. He thinks payment inappropriate, so I make a donation which I believe makes him happy. But who knows when dealing with a man of God?

Perhaps Will Dalton, still droning on, is also, as the Latin has it, dis manibus sacrum — sacred to the gods of the underworld. I hope so; because soon he will join them.

Do you really believe they will be there to welcome him?

“‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,’” said Will. Looking around the hall, a fleeting pause at Dante.

“Pretty familiar, isn’t it? Genesis, chapter one, verse one. I want to contrast that story, spanning six days, with the same story told by science, spanning 6 billion years. The Bible representing myth, science representing the rational mind, and here is the moment of intersection. Religionists might object to calling the Holy Bible myth; but certainly Genesis is the creation story (remember, myth can be more true than mere fact) best known to our Western minds.

“Myth can tell us who we are-science, what we are. And here is where the attempt to equate creationism with evolution-to present them both as authoritarian belief systems-is bound to fail. Evolution is science; should it claim to be a belief system, it would make a lousy one. When creationism, a belief system, claims to be scientific, it makes lousy science. Here tonight, we seek not exacerbation, but intersection between the two systems. Is it possible, with science and myth telling two such wildly different stories?

“Or do they? Genesis first: ‘And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.’

“What says science of this birth? Science would go back before the making of the heavens and earth, to the making of the universe. Most astronomers today accept the Big Bang theory: an immense explosion 15 billion years ago that flung energy and pulverized matter out as far as space stretches. Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan start the story of our earth 10 billion years later in Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors:

“‘There was once a time before the Sun and Earth existed, a time before there was day or night, long before there was anyone to record the beginning for those who might come after… An immense cloud of gas and dust is swiftly collapsing under its own weight.’

“Almost ‘in the beginning,’ almost ‘once upon a time’-but not quite. In their version, matter already exists. And they take pains to point out, ‘Nothing lives forever, in Heaven as it is on Earth. Even the stars grow old, decay, and die.’

“In the Bible’s account, only God is eternal. ‘And God said, Let there be light: and there was light…’

“‘And God divided the light from the darkness… And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.’

“In the beginning, God was already here. The God, the Baltimore Catechism tells us, Who ‘always was, and always will be, and always remains the same.’ In other words, God’s nature is to exist It’s what He does, all by Himself. There never was nothing, there always was Something — God. Self-creating. Self-sustaining.

“Thus Genesis would say, nothing material lives forever. Would say, science’s immense clouds of gas and matter weren’t there until God created them, because it was not their nature to exist. Would perhaps say that the Big Bang was merely God’s hand-clap to create matter, and would ask, Where else could gas and dust come from- in the beginning?

“Science is usually silent on beginnings-remember? — and only says this swirling mass of gas and dust, whatever its origin, soon collapsed under its own weight. The chaotic cloud became a thin disk, glowing a dull red in its exact center. During the next 100 million years, the central mass got whiter, more brilliant, until finally, some 5 billion years ago, it burst into sustained thermonuclear fire. The sun had been born.

“‘Let there be light: and there was light.’

“The two accounts don’t differ much after all, do they?

“Inside that cloud, milling around that central fire, were a million or more small worlds, with a few thousand larger ones that eventually would collide and fuse together. All of this was occurring in a vast sparsely mattered intersteller vacuum within our galaxy, the Milky Way. Which, by the way, is only one of a hundred billion similar galaxies in the universe-where solar systems such as ours are being formed about one hundred a second.

“As the dust settled, a vast array of little worlds made up of those colliding atoms and grains began revolving around our sun in a variety of slightly different orbits. Inevitably, they started ramming into one another. If the meeting was head-on, goodbye, worldlets. If it was a matter of gently intersecting trajectories, however, one larger world could be born from the fusing of two smaller ones.