Snitch World Read Online Free PDF Page B

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