Coat
by
Joe R. Lansdale
When James saw the man in the streetlights, he hated him on sight because of the coat. It wasn’t fashionable. If the man had been unfashionable in all other ways he could have ignored it, but no, this was a man who should have known better. He was a man with a good shirt and slacks and fine tie, and the best shoes available, and yet, he wore a coat out of style and certainly one that did not make for a proper appearance. It was an odd coat of undetermined color and absolutely no substance. It had all the grace of a car wreck. It flopped in the winter wind at the lapels like bat wings flexing, caught up in back and whipped backwards like the tail of a swallow. 
There was no excuse for it really. 
Sure, he saw plenty of unfashionable people, but this fellow must know better, having acquired the most fashionable and best clothes otherwise. It was not a matter of being uninformed, he was flaunting a disregard for the proper and the respectable, and was therefore insulting the very business James was a part of. Fashion design. 
There was no use calling him on it, James was certain. A man like that knew how things ought to be. A man with his hair perfectly cut and perfectly combed, and perfectly dressed, except for that horrid coat. 
Still, James found himself following the man, deeply bothered by it all. He was a man that understood fashion, and loved it, and believed it was more than an expression of self. That it was in fact, a kind of religion, and here was an insult to his religion. 
The man moved out of the street lights and into a dark alley near a stairwell, and James knew this was a bad place to be walking, but if the man was dull enough to do so, and in that horrid coat, then he would be brave enough to do so and call him on the matter after all. He found he just couldn’t let it rest. 
James followed as the man took the dark stairs, and when the fellow was halfway down, James called out, “Sir, that is an awful coat. I don’t mean to be rude, but really.” 
The man, nothing but a shadow on the stairs now, paused, looked back. “My coat?” 
“Of course,” James said. Do I have on a horrid coat? I think not, and nor should you, this is the finest and best of this year’s fashion that I’m wearing. Perhaps last year, next year, it will be out of favor, but it is all the rage for now, and you, sir, have plenty of fine fashionable coats to pick from, though I, of course recommend my own brand of coat..” 
“What?” said the man in the shadows. 
“The coat,” James said. “Your coat. It’s hideous.” 
The man came up the stairs and stopped only a few feet from James, looking up at him. “You’re kidding, right?” 
“I think not. That is one hideous coat.” 
The man sighed. “I can’t believe you’re concerned about my coat.” 
“It’s just…how shall we put it, an atrocity against fashion and against mankind.” 
“It was once fashionable.” 
“And, I’m quite sure that fig leaves over the testicles were once fashionable, but in our modern society, in our world, fashion is all, and it changes. Someone once thought the tie died tee-shirt and bell bottoms were fashionable, but, times change. Thank goodness.” 
“Look, not that it’s any of your business, but my father was a tailor. He made this coat—” 
“Well, it may have been something before electricity,” James said, “but now, it’s just crude.” 
“He made it for himself many years back, when he was a young man. He is dead now, gone, and though it’s none of your business whatsoever, this is an heirloom. It may not look like much, it may look thin, but it’s surprisingly warm, and very comfortable, very flexible. Happy?” 
“Not at all. Look, you seem like a nice fellow. It’s one thing for someone of…well, the lower classes to wear that coat, but for you to mix fashion like that, that dreadful coat over those fine clothes, it should be a hanging offense.” 
The man threw up his hands. “I’ve had enough of you. What business is it of yours?” 
“I spend a large part of my time designing fashion, trying to make the world and those who live in it more attractive. Take what I’m wearing for example—” 
“I wouldn’t take it if you gave it to me,” the man said. “I’m quite comfortable with my heirloom coat, and you, sir, are a weirdo who needs to go home and run his head under the shower until it clears, or, until you drown.” 
The man turned and began walking down the stairs. James felt himself heat up as if a coal had been dropped inside his body to nestle in the pit of his stomach. He let out a sound like a wounded animal and went charging down the stairway, slamming both hands into the man’s back, sending him sailing down the steps to bounce on several, and to finally land hard and bloody in a heap at the bottom. 
James stood startled, his hands still out in front of him, like a mime pretending to push at an invisible door. 
“My God,” James said aloud. He eased down the stairs and stood over the man, called out. “Hey, you okay?” 
The man didn’t move. The man didn’t speak. The man didn’t moan. 
James bent down by the man’s head and spoke again, asking if he was okay. Still no answer. 
James looked left and right, over his shoulder and up the stairs. No one had seen him. He looked about. No crime cameras. It had all happened suddenly and in darkness. He hadn’t meant for it to happen, it had merely been an angry response. Insulting fashion was not acceptable. And now, the man in the unfashionable coat lay dead at the bottom of the stairs. 
Well, thought James, dressing like that, talking like that, and knowing better, he deserved to be dead. 
James took a deep breath and rolled the man on his stomach and pulled the coat off of him, tucked it under his arm, started up the stairs. 
He was looking for the first large trash can to deposit the coat into, but none presented itself. Carrying the ugly coat, even rolled up in a tight bundle, made James feel somewhat ill. The thing was absolutely without design, as unfashionable as a hat made from the mangy skins of dead street rats. 
Finally, he saw a trashcan and was about to deposit it, but, there was a police officer. James paused, realized it would mean nothing to the officer to see him toss the coat, but then again, he felt very odd about the matter. Moments ago he had merely been willing to impart a bit of fashion wisdom to a man that should have known better, and in the end he had killed him. You might even call it murder, though that had not been his intent. The more James thought about it, the more he felt there had been something inside of him brewing all along, all having to do with that ugly coat and the man’s blatant insult to fashion. 
James passed the officer, still not able to toss the coat, wearing it under his arm like a cancerous tumor. He walked on, not spying another trashcan of correct size, unable to dump it. He thought of giving it to a homeless person. That would be all right. That would fit. No fashion loss there. But no homeless person presented himself, and frankly, he had come to hate the coat so much, that the idea he might give it away to someone and see it worn about the city, even on someone as unfashionable as a homeless drifter, was not appealing. And there was another factor; it would serve as a constant reminder of what he had done. Though, the more he thought about it, the more comfortable he felt with his actions. In fact, it was a kind of prize he had now, a souvenir of the event, a reminder of the moment when he had corrected a horrible wrong. 
Sometimes, you just had to take the more direct and deadly route to repair things that were socially wrong, and that coat was wrong, wrong, wrong. 
He made it all the way to his plush apartment with the coat, and decided he no longer wanted to toss it. His thoughts earlier were correct. This was an important reminder of a blow struck for the fashionable. 
Inside his apartment he unfolded the coat and draped it over the back of a chair. Hideous indeed, and spotted in places with blood. He opened a bottle of wine and sat at his table with bread and cheese and ate, and watched the coat as if he thought it might suddenly leap up and run about the room. He discovered that what he had hated before about the coat, he still hated, but now the sight of it gave him pleasure with the memory of his deed, and the blood on it sweetened his thoughts. 
His own father had worn a coat not too unlike that. It suddenly came to him, and the sweetness he had experienced soured somewhat. He thought of his father, the poor old bastard, working the fields and coming home covered in sod, the old coat stained with the dirt of the fields, the same dirt under the old man’s fingernails. And his mother, and himself, they had never worn anything but rags. No fashion there. None at all. 
But through hard work and part-time jobs, he had finished school and finished his studies at the University, and gone on to study fashion. He found he was quite good at design, and as he became known, and was able to distance himself from his past; he changed his past. He made up his former life, and it was a better one than the one he had actually experienced. Cut himself off from his father and mother and their little dirt farm, and when he heard that the both of them had died, and were buried not far from where his father had turned up the dirt to plant the potatoes and the like, well, he only felt a minor pang of regret. He dove deeper into his work, deeper into design, deeper into fashion, until he hardly remembered his old self at all. 
Though that coat, that damnable coat had reminded him. That was it. That was the whole matter of the thing. He had been reminded of his own father, not a tailor, but a farmer, a man for whom fashion did not exist, a man of the earth, a man with dirt under his nails. And his mother, always tired, always frumpy, a face that makeup had not touched, a back that had never felt the softness of silk. He tried not to think of the shapeless clothing he had once worn. Or the coat his father had worn, not too unlike that ugly thing on the back of the chair, a coat perhaps made by the very tailor who had made this. Tailor, a man who could design such a wart on the art of fashion should call himself a butcher, not a tailor. 
By the time he went to bed, James felt quite pleased with himself. A man divorced from his old life, a man who had struck a blow for grace and poise, and the wearing of better material. 
He lay in bed for awhile, ran the incident over and over in his head, and finally he turned to a book, lay in bed with the reading light behind him, but the words did not form thoughts, they were merely bugs that danced on the page. 
Finally, he put the book aside and turned off the light, slowly drifted into sleep. 
Until the noise. 
It echoed from somewhere distant, and then the echo grew and thundered, and he sat up, only to find that it was raining and that thunder was banging and lightning was jumping, and a very cool and pleasant wind was slipping through his open window, making the curtains flap like gossip tongues. He slipped out of bed and went to the window, stuck his head out of it and looked down at the dark and empty street. He felt rain on his neck. He pulled back inside, considered closing the window, but decided against it. It was too hot to have the window closed. He hoped that the rain would soon pass, and with it the flashing of lightning and the rolling of thunder. 
On his way back to bed, just as he passed the chair over which the coat was draped, he felt himself brush against the sleeve of the coat. He jerked away from it as if it were a serpent that had tried to coil itself around his wrist. 
Glancing at the coat, he was surprised to find that the sleeves were hanging loose, and in fact, nothing was touching him but the sleeve of his own pajama top. He had felt certain that out of the corner of his eye he had seen the coat move, and that what he had felt was not the fine softness of his personally designed pajamas, but the coarseness of the coat. 
He climbed back in bed, lay with his head propped up on his pillows, and studied the coat in the flashes of the lightning. When the lightning lit things up, it was as if the coat moved, a kind of strobe effect. 
“Of course,” he said to himself. “That’s it. That’s what it was. An illusion. “ 
But that didn’t keep him from thinking about the touch on his wrist. He pushed himself down into his covers, like a product being dropped into a bag, and tried to sleep, and did, for a while. 
He awoke to a rough feeling on his body. It was as if he were wearing the coat. He rose up quickly, kicking back the covers, only to find that he was in his pajamas, and that the coat was still in its place; one of the sleeves however had been blown by the wind and now it lay in the seat of the chair as if resting an invisible hand in an invisible lap. 
James pulled off his pajama top and tossed it on the floor. Tomorrow he would throw the thing away. It had somehow grown stiff, perhaps in the wash, starch or some such thing. Fine pajamas were never to have starch. Fine cloth of any kind was never to have starch. He would have to speak to the maid about how she did laundry. 
Punching his pillows, propping one on top of the other, he put his back to the headboard, and watched the lighting in the window, listened to the rain and the thunder, and then the coat moved. 
James jerked his head to the chair. The coat sleeve that had been lying in the seat of the chair had fallen off to the side again. The wind, most likely, but it made him think of the man he had killed, how it had looked on the man as he walked, how it had been caught up in the wind, how the lapels had flapped, how the length of it had blown back behind him. He thought too of the man’s father, the poor tailor, working away to make himself a coat, and how he had proudly passed the horrible item onto his son, and then he thought of his own father, and his similar coat, and how it had been caked with dirt, and how the old man had had dirt beneath his nails, and then he thought of his worn-out mother, and how they had died, without him, out there on that god-forsaken property, and how they lay beneath that dirt, the grit of it seeping into their coffins and onto their ivory grins. He closed his eyes, saw the young man who had owned the coat falling down the stairs, remembered how he had stood on the steps, his hands out in front of him, frozen in position after the act. 
The wind picked up and the sleeves of the coat were lifted and they flapped dramatically. James felt a cold chill wrap itself around him, and he knew it was not caused by the wind, and he knew then why he had pushed the man, and why he had taken the coat, because the coat had belonged to him; it was the sort of coat he had been born to wear. He had ran from such a thing all his life, but it was his burden, this coat, and it was his past, and it was his. The coat that should lie on his back, the sleeves that should hang on his arms. 
The wind blew harder and the rain came in the window with it. The coat, perhaps caught on the wind, stirred, then seemed to leap off the chair, across the bed, and flapped around James, the sleeve of it catching about his neck. 
James leaped from bed, screamed, ran wildly, tripped over a foot stool, clambered to his feet, slammed into a wall. The sleeve was tight around his neck, and the rest of the coat lay against his skin, and it was coarse, so coarse. It was his life, this coarse coat, and it wanted him in it, wanted him to claim what he deserved. 
He charged into the chair at the foot of the bed, and stumbled over it, fell toward the window, hit it with tremendous force, went through head first, toward the street below, and then he was jerked upwards, his head snapping back, and then the rough, workingman’s sleeve squeezed tight against his throat and stole his breath. 
Next morning, bright and early, a homeless man discovered him and pointed up, alerted others. The police came, gave him a look see. The sleeve of the coat was wrapped tight about his neck, had practically tied itself, and the rest of it had caught on a nail in the window, and though the coat had torn severely, the sturdiness of the material maintained, leaving James to hang there in his pajama bottoms which he had soiled in death. 
It was most unfashionable. 

"Coat" Subterranean Press on-line magazine © 2007 Joe R. Lansdale.