The Skin Beneath

by Nairne Holtz

  Was there a military cover-up? Sam tries to decide. She doesn’t think Jason is lying, but the whole presentation is like a sales pitch. Maybe it is because she’s Canadian and not used to people turning whatever shitty thing happens to them into litigation or a talk show episode. When the meeting draws to a close, she approaches Jason Weaver.

  “Hi, I’m Sam. I’m visiting from Canada.”

  Jason gives her a quizzical stare.

  Sam continues, “I, uh, was wondering if you could tell me if you’ve run into a Gulf War veteran named Bernie who lives in Detroit. He’s also suffering from Gulf War syndrome. I need to talk to him.”

  Jason peers across Sam to the next person waiting to speak to him. “I don’t know a Bernie. As you’ve heard, there’s a lot of people with Gulf War syndrome.”

  “He dated my sister, and they were investigating a political conspiracy to do with the Gulf War.” Sam improvises. “Maybe the same one you’re talking about.”

  This gets his attention. His face reddens. “This isn’t one of those nut job conspiracy theories. This is real. This is real suffering.” Jason punches his legs. Sam has uncorked his frustration, liquid nitrogen has escaped from a beaker— smoke with the power to change the temperature of the room. People are staring at them.

  “I’m sorry if I offended you,” Sam says. “I think you’ve misunderstood me.”

  “A lot of people think nothing happened to me, that I’m making it up,” Jason says, sounding as though he feels sorry for himself.

  Sam crouches down so she can look him in the eye. “My story is pretty hard to believe, too. The guy I’m trying to get a hold of—he may be involved with some kind of militia organization.”

  Jason seems to really see Sam for the first time. He wets his lips. “There’s a bar not far from here, Pat’s Place. Ask for a guy named Rick. He’s always around. He can maybe help you.”

  Pat’s Place is not so different from Le Lapin Blanc. People come to the bar to play games and not just metaphorical ones. You can rent chess sets, Monopoly and backgammon boards as well as games like Risk and Trivial Pursuit. The place is mostly full of college kids. Navel rings adorn the sloping stomachs of lithe girls, peeking above their low-rider jeans. Boys sit in knots, not bothering to move their long legs from the aisles when Sam walks by. At the back, she finds older men playing blackjack and poker. She is about to ask a bartender where she can find a guy named Rick when she hears a man behind her yelling. She turns to see a scrawny guy in fatigues jump up from the table where he is playing cards with four other guys. One of the guys looks as if he’s in college while the other men are in their thirties with military-style hair, crewcuts and brush cuts.

  The man in fatigues squawks, “What, aren’t you glad we terminated their asses? We should have fucked them all up when we had the chance.”

  “Rick, we fought for the Kuwaiti people,” one of his friends says.

  Lazily brushing his bangs out of his eyes, the college kid puts in his two cents. “Man, you’re the type of guy the military really needs to keep their eye on.”

  Rick shakes a fist. “We fought to make the camel jockeys keep pumping our oil, and we should have annexed their fucking country. We should have ripped Saddam’s heart out and drank his blood. If the fucking United Nations weren’t running everything, American people wouldn’t have had to die.”

  The college kid sighs in exasperation. “Dude, would you fold, already? You’re just getting pissed because you’re los-ing.”

  Rick glares at him. “Losing? What do you know about losing? We won the war, but then all those towel heads came over here. Some bitch practically ran me over with her car today because she couldn’t see with her motherfucking sheet over her head.” Turning away from his friends, Rick storms off in the direction of the bar.

  The college kid folds Rick’s hand over: he has nothing, no cards in numerical order, no pairs, no more than two cards in the same suit The kid announces, “Told you. Loser.”

  The men return to their card game while Sam follows Rick to the bar, hoping he will reveal himself to her as easily as he did to his friends. She puts a five down on the bar in front of Rick’s glass of draft. “Let me get it.”

  His eyes bulge. He is probably used to people just tolerating him; his green T-shirt is rimmed with dark patches of sweat and he smells funky. Lifting the beer in Sam’s direction, he says, “Thanks, buddy.”

  He thinks she’s a guy; she hopes her voice won’t give her away. “You’re welcome. Jason Weaver said you might be able to help me—I’m trying to find a guy named Bernie.”

  Rick jerks his head back. “I don’t really know Bernie, but I know the CIA slut he runs with only too well. What do you want with them?”

  Sam chews her lip while contemplating the options. She decides to show her hand. The truth sounds crazy but then so does he. An unforeseen advantage to dealing with the paranoid is they expect the world to be scary and irrational, to be like a Hollywood movie where the plot is strung together with special effects. “My sister died five years ago. She may have been investigating a political conspiracy, and it’s possible Bernie fed her some information that led to her death.”

  Rick snorts. “Figures. You can find Bernie and his bitch selling their shit tomorrow at the gun show.”

  “What gun show would that be?”

  “The one in Eldon at the arena.”

  As if she has some idea of where Eldon is, Sam nods. She hopes the place is nearby. “You wouldn’t happen to have a phone number or address for Bernie or his friend?”

  Rick chuckles. “I don’t talk to my ex anymore. She’s got a restraining order out on me due to my so-called anger management problems. But that’s part of my Gulf War syndrome, right? Mood swings. Not to mention, Cheryl’s the real psycho. It took me awhile to figure that out.” Rick spins his index finger in a funnel, then picks up his beer and goes back to his buddies.

  Amanda squirms in the front seat of the car and flips the visor up and down to examine herself in the mirror. She is wearing a flowered sundress she hopes will make her blend in at the gun show. Sitting beside her, Sam feels the back of her neck twitch, as if a bug is crawling across her skin, but when she brushes her neck, nothing is there. In the rear-view mirror, she can see Francis gazing out the window. By the Detroit river there is an enormous used bookstore, where he plans to spend several hours browsing before making his way back to their hosts’ home on his own.

  “It’s just here,” Francis says. “You can let me out on the street.”

  Sam ignores him, choosing instead to roar over a wedge of curb and race through the parking lot to the front door of the store. She turns to grin at him, but the set of his mouth is hard.

  He holds up his wristwatch, tapping the face. “I expect you two to report back to me on your mission by no later than seventeen hundred hours. If I don’t hear from you by then, I’ll assume your mission has been compromised and take the appropriate measures.”

  “You want us to call you?” Sam asks.

  Francis nods, then gives Sam a short salute as he gets out of the car. Amanda’s shoulders shake with laughter. She is acting as if they are on an anthropological field trip while Sam does feel like a spy, or rather, a prowler. Looking like an obvious queer among militia types in the Midwest isn’t smart so Sam is hoping she can pass for a guy. Passing is trickier in the summer when her breasts aren’t hidden under a jacket. When she got dressed in the morning, she vetoed her collection of cool T-shirts in favour of once again borrowing Francis’s long-sleeved white shirt. Then she bound her chest with a pair of pantyhose she bought the night before at a drug store. To complete the all-American-boy look, Amanda lent Sam a pair of baggy cargo shorts. The plan is for Sam to tell Bernie she is Chloe’s brother and pray he won’t remember Chloe had a sister.

  Sam crosses the torsion of highway to reach the outskirts of the city. Without any buildings, the flatness of the land is more evident. She can follow the trajectory of the road with
her eyes for miles and miles. They drive past fields of hay and corn shrivelling in the heat. The candescent sun, the sparse-ness of trees, and the lack of people walking around makes everything seem desolate. Matthew Shepard and Brandon Teena were both murdered in the American heartland. Sam thinks about their killers: men for whom killing a queer had no greater significance than crushing a cockroach.

  The town of Eldon begins as small farms, two nurseries, and a kennel advertising Jack Russell puppies for sale. Then they reach a grid of residential streets with a few schools and churches and an actual Main street with a hardware store, a grocery store, a movie theatre, and a post office. Sam stops at a gas station because she doesn’t know when she will get another chance to use a single-stall washroom. The gas station employee gives Amanda directions to the arena, which is just outside of town, beside a Wal-Mart.

  The parking lot of the arena is full, so Sam parks on the edge of the highway. She and Amanda walk by trucks and SUVs and read bumper stickers that tell them all they need to know about the drivers. “Wife and Dog Missing, Reward for Dog.” “You Can Have My Gun When You Can Pry It From My Cold, Dead Hands.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Amanda says. “Bernie’s a Gulf War vet suffering from Gulf War syndrome who dated your sister just before she died of a gunshot wound in a New York hotel room. Bernie may or may not know something about a political conspiracy she may have been investigat-ing.”

  “That’s right.” A bead of sweat rolls into Sam’s eye. The air, the heat, is as sticky and thick as cotton candy.

  Across the door of the arena is a painted sheet with the words “Armageddon Expo.” The homemade sign isn’t so different from ones Sam has seen at Pride marches and antiglobalization demos and in a strange way, the antiestab-lishment sentiment is similar as well. But the cultural gulf is driven home as soon as she reaches the door. Two middle-aged bikers with leather vests and Santa Claus beards ask the man standing in front of her if they can check his weapons. The man hands them a gun. The bikers don’t confiscate it, just open it up to make sure it isn’t loaded before giving it back. When Sam was growing up, she loved heading east on the streetcar to Little India, where she ate curry and samosas and stared in the windows of shops, admiring the bolts of lustrous silk cloth East Indian women use to make into saris. She thought of herself as a stranger in a strange land, but she now realizes she was a confident white tourist in a Third World country. Here, she is an illegal immigrant sneaking across the border.

  Sam peeps inside the door at the people milling around. There are a lot of families. The men, wearing jeans, checkered shirts, and John Deere caps, appear to be farmers. Their wives, who are clad in sundresses as Amanda correctly surmised, keep winding their heads around to hurry along their Slushie-slurping progeny. Amanda and Sam might be mistaken for curious college students. When one of the bikers asks Sam for an entrance fee but doesn’t ask Amanda, Sam realizes she is at least passing for a guy. A sign above them announces “women and kids free.”

  Armageddon Expo turns out to be a trade fair for sur-vivalists. Most of what is for sale are guns and firearm accessories. There are pistols, rifles, and shotguns, but at a few tables Sam sees machine guns and wonders if they can be sold legally. Ammunition, holsters, crossbows, scopes, and rangefinders are also available. Sam jerks her shirt out of her shorts; perspiration is plastering her clothes to her body. A hip check from Amanda makes Sam halt. The table in front of them displays Nazi flags and pamphlets. Amanda begins to leaf through various political tracts with the word “Zionism” in the title. A piece of paper taped to the table says “No Visa, American Liberty currency accepted.” A stocky man with a bar code of hair crossing his scalp stands behind the table. Skinhead politics, but he looks like middle management. No shaved head, no camouflage pants—he is concealed in ordinariness.

  “Can I help you, Miss?” he asks.

  Amanda lifts up a newsletter entitled the “Patriot Report.” “I’ll take this.”

  “That’ll be two dollars.”

  She hands him the money. “Do you know if Bernie’s working today?”

  The man points to the back of the room. “He and Cheryl are at the very end. I hear he’s got some new videos. You wouldn’t be one of his actresses, would you?”

  “Could be. You take care now.” Her accent is Midwestern twang with a touch of honey. She rewards him with a coy smile and he looks surprised, then pleased—the power of the skinny blonde over straight men. Even Sam feels a pull of attraction to her. The hard law of desire dictates that you can want what you don’t like, and like what you don’t want.

  Sam and Amanda race through the rest of the exhibit. At the last table they see a straight couple in their thirties who don’t look like farmers. The man is quite handsome, although his appeal lies in the fact that he has no unattractive features. His blond hair is turning grey, and Sam can imagine him coaching minor-league baseball. He seems healthy, however, so perhaps he isn’t Bernie. Just as Sam is trying to decide, she hears the woman say to a boy of seven or eight, who is tugging on her shorts, “You need to play now. Mommy’s busy talking to Bernie.”

  The child picks up a toy gun and begins smashing the butt of it into the cement floor. Only after he has chipped away two inches of the gun does he realize he may have broken his toy. He hurls the gun, then himself onto the floor. Gripping his ankles, he rocks back and forth while making a high-pitched howling sound. Cheryl rushes from her chair to put her arms around her son, and coo.

  When the child has quieted down to a whimper, Amanda states in a loud, cheery voice, “Boys will be boys.”

  “Devon’s a special boy,” Cheryl replies.

  “Aren’t they all?” Amanda simpers.

  “Devon has advanced capabilities. Those idiot teachers at school think he has ADD, but he’s just bored. The way his mind works, he’s so far beyond what they want him to do.”

  Sam puts off introducing herself to Bernie. She surveys their merchandise: cassette tapes of New Country bands, survival manuals, and videos of women in bikinis firing guns and wrestling with each other. Judging by the video covers, Cheryl stars in most of them using the name Honey Black. Bernie and Cheryl’s enterprise is the extreme niche market of patriot arts and culture. Sam opens a survival manual and reads the chapter headings: sniping, explosives, dirty tricks, and counter-surveillance.

  Amanda elbows Sam out of the way in order to stand in front of Bernie. “Excuse me, but your name’s Bernie, right?”

  He knits his eyebrows. “Yeah.”

  Amanda continues, “I think you may have gone out with my sister Chloe about five years ago. She was Canadian.”

  Sam almost drops the book she is looking at. Amanda is improvising, and Sam isn’t sure her strategy will work. Sam resembles Chloe, so who is Sam supposed to be? This is Sam’s mission, but Amanda is hijacking it for some reason.

  Bernie says, “I used to know this girl Chloe from Canada. What’s she up to these days?”

  Fuck. It didn’t even occur to Sam he might not know her sister is dead.

  Amanda blinks several times and manages to make her lower lip quiver. The girl missed her calling. Or did she? “Chloe died in a hotel room in New York. Not long after she met you.”

  “What’re you talking about?” Bernie stands up, unfolding his giant frame. Beyond his size, however, Sam doubts he would intimidate anyone; he speaks slowly and his gestures are executed with uncertainty. Colour is draining from his cheeks as he topples back into his chair. “I thought she got back together with her ex-boyfriend. I figured that’s why I didn’t hear from her. What happened?”

  Amanda gulps. “We thought she shot herself, but now we’re wondering. She told a friend she was investigating a political conspiracy.”

  Cheryl sticks her chin out. “The CIA got to her.” She peeks under the table, and Sam thinks Cheryl is looking for hidden agents, but then sees she is checking up on her son. Sitting cross-legged and tearing the pages of a newspaper into strips, he app
ears to have forgotten the damage he did to his gun. Catching Sam staring, Cheryl asks, “Who’re you?”

  Before Sam can reply, Amanda answers, “My boyfriend. We drove here together from Canada.”

  Her boyfriend? At this point Sam has no choice but to go along with the charade. Clearing her throat, she does her best to deepen her voice. “Hi there.”

  Amanda interrupts, “Can we sit down?”

  “Sure, sure.” Bernie goes over to the next booth and borrows a couple of wooden chairs, which he sets down for them. Amanda sits on one of the chairs while Sam opts to stand. She could be at a church bazaar but she isn’t.

  Folding her arms across her chest, Cheryl asks, “How’d you track us down?” She smiles with her mouth closed—her dark glossed lips remind Sam of slashed cherries. Cheryl has this undercoat of slyness. When she wrestles on her videos, Sam bets Cheryl uses the ropes.

  Amanda glances over at Sam for help but she is silent. She is tempted to tell Cheryl they found her using a Global Positioning System, but since this is Amanda’s show, she can invent her own lies.

  With a partial truth, Amanda forges ahead. “We met this Gulf War veteran named Rick who said you’d be here.”

  Cheryl tosses her hair. “That butt head. He’d turn me over to the authorities even if it meant he never got to see his child again.”

  Amanda frowns. “If either of you can tell us anything about what my sister may have been investigating, I would appreciate it.”

  As if she is communicating with a mentally challenged adult, Cheryl bobs her chin up and down at Amanda. “The CIA supported Iraq in the Gulf War.”

  “I suppose you have evidence of this?” Amanda’s tone is haughty with disbelief.

  Cheryl stabs herself in the chest with her fingers. “Yeah. Me. I used to work for them. I was trained and utilized by the CIA as a deep cover operative. I was part of a covert operation to assassinate the head of the National Security Agency, who was in cahoots with the aliens that are here now. My employers thought a female would stand a better chance of getting close to the target, but what the CIA didn’t count on was my being impregnated by the aliens. Then, about five years ago, I broke out of the black operations to protect my son. I’ve been a political prisoner ever since, persecuted by the government as part of their neutralization campaign against me for being a whistle-blower.” She takes an inhaler from her pocket, shakes it, and then puffs in.