Koko

by Peter Straub

  “Don’t be an idiot,” Beevers said. “It was Mark, I think.” He looked to Tina for help, but Tina frowned and shrugged.

  “Manuel Orosco Dengler,” Michael said. “I was amazed that I didn’t know that.”

  “Manuel?” Conor said. “Dengler was Mexican?”

  “Michael, you got the wrong Dengler,” Tina Pumo said, laughing.

  “Nope,” Michael said. “There’s not only one M.O. Dengler, there’s only one Dengler. He’s ours.”

  “A Mexican,” Conor mused.

  “You ever hear of any Mexicans named Dengler? His parents just gave him Spanish names, I guess. Who knows? Who even cares? He was a hell of a soldier, that’s all I know. I wish—”

  Pumo raised his glass to his mouth instead of finishing his sentence, and none of the men spoke for an almost elastically long moment.

  Linklater muttered something unintelligible and walked across the room and sat on the floor.

  Michael stood up to add fresh ice cubes to his glass and saw Conor Linklater backed up against the far wall like an imp in his black clothes, the brown beer bottle dangling between his knees. The orange writing on his chest was nearly the same shade as his hair. Conor was looking back at him with a small secret smile.

  3

  Maybe Beans Beevers didn’t go to Harvard or Yale, Conor was thinking, but he had gone someplace like that—someplace where everybody in sight just took it all for granted. To Conor it seemed that about ninety-five percent of the people in the United States did nothing but fret and stew about money—not having enough money made them crazy. They zeroed out on booze, they cranked themselves up to commit robberies: oblivion, tension, oblivion. The other five percent of the population rode above this turmoil like froth on a wave. They went to the schools their fathers had gone to and they married and divorced one another, as Harry had married and divorced Pat Caldwell. They had jobs where you shuffled papers and talked on the telephone. From behind their desks they watched the money stroll in the door, coming home. They even passed out these jobs to each other—Beans Beevers, who spent as much time at the bar in Pumo’s restaurant as he did at his desk, worked in the law firm run by Pat Caldwell’s brother.

  When Conor had been a boy in South Norwalk, a kind of wondering and resentful curiosity had made him pedal his old Schwinn up along Route 136 to Mount Avenue in Hampstead. Mount Avenue people were so rich they were nearly invisible, like their enormous houses—from the road all you could see of some of them were occasional sections of brick or stucco walls. Most of these waterfront mansions seemed empty of anybody but servants, yet now and then young Conor would spot an obvious owner-resident. Conor learned from his brief sightings that although these Mount Avenue owner-residents usually wore the same grey suits and blue jackets as everyone else in Hampstead, sometimes they blazoned forth like Harry Beevers in riotous pink and bilious green, in funny-looking bow ties and pale double-breasted suits. It was sort of like the Emperor’s New Clothes—nobody had the balls to tell Protestant millionaires they looked ridiculous. (Conor was certain that none of these people could be Catholic.) Bow ties! Red suspenders with pictures of babies on them!

  Conor couldn’t help smiling to himself—here he was, almost flat broke, thinking he ought to pity a rich lawyer. Next week he had a job taping sheetrock in a remodeled kitchen, for which he might earn a couple hundred dollars. Harry Beevers could probably earn double that sitting on a barstool, talking to Jimmy Lah. Conor looked up, his sense of humor painfully sparkling, and saw Michael Poole looking at him as if the same kind of thought had occurred to him.

  Beevers had some typical bullshit up his sleeve, Conor thought, but Michael knew better than to fall for it, whatever it was.

  Conor smiled to himself, remembering Dengler’s word for people who never experienced dread and took everything for granted: “toons,” as in cartoons. Now the toons were running everything—they were scrambling upward, running over everything in their way. These days it seemed that half the people in Donovan’s, Conor’s favorite South Norwalk bar, had MBAs, put mousse on their hair, and drank blender drinks. Conor had the sense that some enormous change had happened all at once, that all these new people had just popped out of their own television sets. He could almost feel sorry for them, their morality was so fucked up.

  Thinking about the toons depressed Conor. He felt like drinking a lot more even though he knew he was getting close to his limit. But wasn’t this a reunion? They were sitting around in a hotel room like a bunch of old men. He drained the last of his beer.

  “Give me some of that vodka, Mikey,” he said, and lobbed the empty beer bottle into the wastebasket.

  “Attaboy,” Pumo said, raising his glass to him.

  Michael made a drink and came across the room to hand it to Conor.

  “Okay, a toast,” Conor said, and stood up. “Man. It feels good to do this.” He raised his glass. “To M.O. Dengler. Even if he was a Mexican, which I doubt.”

  Conor poured ice-cold vodka into his mouth and gulped it down. He felt better instantly, so good that he downed the rest. “Man, sometimes I can remember shit that happened over there like it was yesterday, and the stuff that really did happen yesterday, I can’t hardly remember at all. I mean—sometimes I’ll start to think about that guy who ran that club at Camp Crandall, who had that gigantic wall of beer cases—”

  “Manly,” Tina Pumo said, laughing.

  “Manly. Fucking Manly. And I’ll start to think about how did he manage to get all that beer there, anyway? And then I’ll start to think about little things he did, the way he acted.”

  “Manly belonged behind a counter,” Beevers said.

  “That’s right! I bet Manly’s got his own little business right now, he’s got everything lined up just right, man, he’s got a good car and his own house, he’s got a wife, kids, he’s got one of those basketball hoops up on his garage …” Conor stared into space for a second, enjoying his vision of Manly’s life—Manly would be great in suburbia. He thought like a criminal without actually being one, so he was probably making a fortune doing something like installing security systems. Then Conor remembered that in a way Manly had started all their troubles, back in Vietnam …

  A day before they came into Ia Thuc, Manly had separated from the column and found himself alone in the jungle. Without even meaning to make noise, he started sounding like a six-foot bumblebee in a panic. Everyone else in the column froze. A sniper known as “Elvis” had been dogging them for two days, and Manly’s commotion was all he needed to improve his luck. Conor knew what he should have done—he had discovered long ago how to make himself melt into the background. It was almost mystical. Conor could virtually become invisible (and he knew it worked, for twice VC patrols had looked right at him without seeing him). Dengler, Poole, Pumo, even Underhill, could do this almost as well as he could, but Manly could not do it at all. Conor began silently working through the jungle toward the sound—he was angry enough to kill Manly, if that was what it took to shut him up. Within a minute fraction of a second, he knew as if by telepathy—so silent—that Dengler was following him.

  They found Manly bulling through the curtain of green, hacking away with his machete in one hand, his M-16 at his hip in the other. Conor started to glide up to him, half-thinking about slitting his throat, when Dengler simply materialized next to Manly and grabbed his machete arm. For a second they were motionless. Conor crept forward, afraid that Manly would shriek after the numbness wore off. Instead, he heard a single report from off to his right, somewhere up in the canopy, and saw Dengler topple over. He felt shock so deep and sudden his hands and feet went cold.

  He and Manly had walked Dengler back to the rest of the column. Even though the impact had knocked him down and he was bleeding steadily, Dengler’s wound was only superficial. A wad of flesh the size of a mouse had been punched out of his left arm. Peters made him lie down on the jungle floor, packed and bandaged the wound, and pronounced him fit to move.

&nb
sp; If Dengler had not been wounded even so slightly, Conor thought, Ia Thuc might have been just another empty village. Seeing Dengler in pain had soured everybody. It pumped up their anxiety. Maybe they had all been foolish to believe in Dengler as they had, but seeing him bloodied and wounded on the forest floor had shocked Conor all over again—it was as bad as seeing him hit in the first place. After that, it had been easy to blow it, go over the edge in Ia Thuc. Afterward nothing was the same. Even Dengler changed, maybe because of the publicity and the court-martial. Conor himself had stayed so high on drugs that he still could not remember some things that had happened in the months between Ia Thuc and his DEROS—but he knew that just before the court-martials he had cut the ears off a dead North Vietnamese soldier and stuck a Koko card in his mouth.

  Conor realized that he was in danger of getting depressed again. He was sorry he had ever mentioned Manly.

  “Refill,” he said, and went to the table and poured more vodka into his glass. The other three were still looking at him, smiling at their cheerleader—other people always counted on him to provide their good times.

  “Hey, to the Ninth Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment.” Conor swallowed another ice-cold bullet of vodka, and the face of Harlan Huebsch popped into his mind. Harlan Huebsch was a kid from Oregon who had tripped a wire and blown himself in half a few days after turning up at Camp Crandall. Conor could remember Huebsch’s death very clearly because an hour or so afterwards, when they had finally reached the other side of the little mined field, Conor had stretched out against a grassy dike and noticed a long tangled strand of wire snagged in the bootlaces on his right foot. The only difference between himself and Huebsch was that Huebsch’s mine had worked the way it was supposed to. Now Harlan Huebsch was a name up on the Memorial—Conor promised himself he’d find it, once they all got there.

  Beevers wanted to toast the Tin Man, and though everybody joined him, Linklater knew that only Beans meant it. Mike Poole toasted Si Van Vo, which Conor thought was hilarious. Then Conor made everybody drink to Elvis. And Tina Pumo wound up toasting Dawn Cucchio, who was a whore he met on R&R in Sydney, Australia. Conor laughed so hard at the idea of drinking to Dawn Cucchio that he had to lean against the wall to hold himself up.

  But then murkier, darker feelings surfaced in him again. If you wanted to accept the reality of what was going on, he was an unemployed laborer sitting around with a lawyer, a doctor, and a guy who owned a restaurant so fancy there were pictures of it in magazines.

  Conor realized that he had been staring at Pumo, who looked like a page out of GQ. Tina always looked good, especially in his restaurant. Conor went there once or twice a year, but spent most of his money at the bar. On his last visit he had seen a juicy little Chinese girl who must have been Maggie. “Hey, Tina, what’s the best dish you make, down there in your restaurant?”

  Conor slurred a little on best, but he didn’t think the others could hear it.

  “Duck Saigon, probably,” Tina said. “At least, that’s my favorite right now. Marinated roast duck, dried rice noodles. The taste is out of sight.”

  “You put that fish sauce on top of it?”

  “Nuoc mam sauce? Sure.”

  “I don’t know how anybody can eat that gook food,” Conor said. “Remember when we were over there? We all knew you couldn’t eat that shit, man.”

  “We were eighteen years old back then,” Tina said. “Our idea of a great meal was a Whopper and fries.”

  Conor did not admit to Tina that a Whopper and fries was still his idea of a great meal. He gulped down another silver bullet of vodka and felt lower than ever.

  4

  But in a little while it was almost like the old days again. Conor learned that along with all the normal Pumo difficulties, Tina now had to deal with the exciting new complications caused by Maggie being nearly twenty years younger and not only as crazy as he was, but smarter besides. When she moved in with him, Tina began feeling “too much pressure.” This much was absolutely typical. What was different about Maggie was that after a few months she disappeared. Now she was out-Pumoing Pumo. Maggie called him on the telephone, but refused to tell him where she was staying. Sometimes she placed coded messages for him on the back page of the Village Voice.

  “Do you know what it’s like to read the back page of every issue of the Voice when you’re forty-one?” Pumo asked.

  Conor had never read any page of any issue of the Village Voice. He shook his head.

  “Every mistake you ever made with a woman is right there in cold hard print. Falling for someone’s looks—‘Beautiful blonde girl in Virginia Woolf T-shirt at Sedutto’s, we almost talked and now I’m kicking myself. I know we could be special. Please call man with backpack. 581-4901.’ Romantic idealization—‘Suki. You are my shooting star. Cannot live without you. Bill.’ Romantic despair—‘I haven’t stopped hurting since you left. Forlorn in Yorkville.’ Masochism—‘Bruiser—No guilt necessary, I forgive you. Puffball.’ Cuteness—‘Twinky-poo. Twiddles wuvs yum-yum.’ Indecision—‘Mesquite. Still thinking. Margarita.’ Of course there’s a lot of other stuff, too. Prayers to St. Jude. Numbers you can call if you want to get off coke. Baldness cures. Lots of Strip-O-Grams. And Jews For Jesus, every single week. But mainly it’s all these broken hearts, this terrible early-twenties agony. Conor, I have to pore over this back page like it was the Rosetta stone. I get the damn paper as soon as it hits the stands on Wednesday morning. I read the page over four or five times because it’s easy to miss clues the first couple times. See, I have to figure out which messages are hers. Sometimes she calls herself ‘Type A’—that’s Taipei, where she was born—but other times she’s ‘Leather Lady.’ Or ‘Half Moon’—that was for a tattoo she got last year.”

  “Where?” Conor asked. He didn’t feel so bad now, only a little drunk. At least he wasn’t as fucked up as Pumo. “On her ass?”

  “Just a little below her navel,” Tina said. He looked as though he was sorry he had brought up the subject of his girlfriend’s tattoo.

  “Maggie has a half moon tattooed on her pussy?” Conor asked. He wished he had been in the tattoo parlor when that was going on. Even if Chinese girls weren’t Conor’s thing—they reminded him of the Dragon Lady in “Terry and the Pirates”—he had to admit that Maggie was more than normally good-looking. Everything about Maggie seemed round. She somehow managed to make it seem normal to walk around in chopped-up punk hair and clothes you bought already ripped.

  “No. I told you,” Pumo said, looking irritated, “just a little below her navel. The bottom of a bikini covers most of it.”

  “It’s almost on her pussy!” Conor said. “Is any of it in her hair? Were you there when the guy did it? Did she cry or anything?”

  “You bet I was there. I wanted to make sure he didn’t let his attention wander.” Pumo took a sip of his drink. “Maggie didn’t even blink.”

  “How big is it?” Conor asked. “About half dollar size?”

  “If you’re so curious, ask her to show it to you.”

  “Oh, sure,” Conor said. “I can really see me doing that.”

  Then Conor overheard part of the conversation Mike Poole was having with Beans Beevers—something about Ia Thuc and a grunt Poole had talked to during the parade.

  Beevers asked, “He was an ex-combat soldier?”

  “Looked like he got out of the field about a week ago,” Mike said, giving his little smile.

  “This vet really remembered all about me and he said I should get a Medal of Honor?”

  “He said they should have given you a Medal of Honor for what you did, and then taken it away again for shooting off your mouth in front of journalists.”

  This was the first time Conor had ever heard Beevers confronted with the opinion, once widely held, that he had been a dope to brag about Ia Thuc to the press. Of course Beevers acted as though he were hearing this opinion for the first time.

  “Ridiculous,” Beevers said. “I can just about go along w
ith him on the Congressional medal idea, but not on that. I’m proud of everything I did there, and I hope all of you are too. If it was up to me, we’d all have Congressional medals.” He looked down at the front of his shirt, smoothed it, then lifted his chin—stuck it out. “But people know we did the right thing. That’s as good as a medal. People agree with the decision of the court-martial, even if they forgot it ever happened.”

  Conor wondered how Beans could say these things. He didn’t see how people could know they’d done the right thing at Ia Thuc when even the men who had been there didn’t know exactly what had happened.

  “You’d be surprised how many guys I meet, I’m talking about other lawyers, judges too, who know my name because of that action,” Beevers said. “To tell you the truth, being a sort of a minor league hero has helped me out professionally more than once.” Beans looked around at all of them with a sweet candor that made Conor want to puke. “I’m not ashamed of anything I did in Nam. You have to turn what happens to you into a plus.”

  Michael Poole laughed. “Spoken from the heart, Harry.”

  “This is important,” Beevers insisted. For a second he looked both pained and puzzled. “I have the impression that you three guys are accusing me of something.”

  “I didn’t accuse you of anything, Harry,” Poole said.

  “So didn’t I,” said Conor in exasperation. He pointed at Tina Pumo. “So didn’t he!”

  “We were with each other every step of the way,” Harry said, and it took Conor a moment to figure out that he had gone back to talking about Ia Thuc. “We always helped each other out. We were a team, all of us, Spitalny included.”

  Conor could restrain himself no longer. “I wish that asshole would have got killed there,” he broke in. “I never met anybody as mean as him. Spitalny didn’t like anybody, man. Right? And he claimed he got stung by wasps? In that cave? I don’t think there are any wasps in Nam, man. I saw bugs the size of dogs there, man, but I never saw any wasps.”