by Peter Straub
“I can’t believe this,” said Pumo. “All three of you guys just lost your minds.”
“You were the first to say you’d go,” Conor reminded him.
“I can’t run out on my life for a month. I have a restaurant to run.”
Pumo hadn’t noticed when everything went out of control. Okay, Conor thought, Singapore, what the hell?
“Tina, we need you.”
“I need me more than you do. Count me out.”
“If you stay behind, you’ll be sorry the rest of your life.”
“Jesus, Harry, in the morning this is going to sound like an Abbott and Costello movie. What the hell do you think you’re going to do if you ever manage to find him?”
Pumo wants to stay around New York and play games with Maggie Lah, Conor thought.
“Well, we’ll see,” Beevers said.
Conor lobbed his empty beer bottle toward the wastebasket. The bottle fell three feet short and slanted off under the dresser. He could not remember switching from vodka to beer. Or had he started on beer, then gone to vodka, and switched back to beer again? Conor inspected the glasses on the table and tried to pick out his old one. The other three were giving him that “cheerleader” look again, and he wished he’d made his net shot into the wastebasket. Conor philosophically poured several inches of vodka into the nearest glass. He scooped a handful of cubes from the bucket and plopped them in. “Give me an S,” he said, raising the glass in a final toast. He drank. “Give an I. Give me an N. Give me a … G. Give me an A.”
Beevers told him to sit down and be quiet, which was fine with Conor. He couldn’t remember what came after A anyhow. Some of the vodka slopped onto his pants as he sat down again beside Mike.
“Now can we go see Jimmy Stewart?” he heard Pumo ask.
3
A little while later someone suggested that he lie down and take a nap on Mike’s bed, but Conor refused, no, no, he was fine, he was with his asshole buddies, all he had to do was get moving, anybody who could still spell Singapore wasn’t too bent out of shape …
Without any transition he found himself out in the corridor. He was having trouble with his feet, and Mikey had a firm grip on his left arm. “What’s my room number?” he asked Mikey.
“You’re staying with Tina.”
“Good old Tina.”
They turned a corner and good old Tina and Harry Beevers were right in front of them, waiting for the elevator. Beevers was combing his hair in front of a big mirror.
The next thing Conor knew, he was sitting on the floor of the elevator, but he managed to get back on his feet before the doors opened.
“You’re cute, Harry,” he said to the back of Beevers’ head.
The elevator door opened and for a long time they moved through long, blank hallways crowded with people. Conor kept bumping into guys who were too impatient to listen to his apologies. He heard people singing “Homeward Bound,” which was the world’s most beautiful song. “Homeward Bound” made him feel like crying.
Poole was making sure he didn’t fall down. Conor wondered if Mike actually knew what a great guy he was, and decided he didn’t—that was what made him so great.
“I’m really okay,” he said.
He sat down beside Mike in a darkened hall. A black-haired man with a narrow moustache, wearing what looked like a prizefighter’s championship belt under his tuxedo, was singing “America the Beautiful” and jumping around onstage in front of a band.
“We missed Jimmy Stewart,” Mike whispered to him. “This is Wayne Newton.”
“Wayne Newton?” Conor asked, then heard that his voice was too loud. People were laughing at what he had said. Conor felt too embarrassed for Mikey to set him straight—Wayne Newton was a fat teenager who sang like a girl. This Las Vegas toughie wasn’t Wayne Newton. Conor closed his eyes and the whole dark hall instantly began to swing him around with it in great zooming circles. Conor found that he was unable to open his eyes. Applause, whistles, shouts of approval filled his ears. He heard his own first snore, and less than a second later fell into unconsciousness.
4
“We don’t have as many groupies as musicians,” Harry Beevers said to Poole, “but they’re out there. They’re basically earth mothers with a kinky little yen for excitement. Is he getting heavy? Put him on your couch and come back down to the bar with us.”
“I want to get to bed,” Poole said. Conor Linklater, a hundred and sixty pounds of dead weight bequeathed to him by Tina Pumo, was draped over his shoulder.
Beevers breathed alcohol at Poole. “Nam groupies are complicated, but by now I’ve got them figured out. They get off on, one, the idea of our being soldiers and fighting men but more spiritual somehow than other vets—two, they’ve got a little slug of social worker in them and they want to demonstrate that our country loves us after all—and three, they don’t know what we did over there and it turns them on.” Beevers glittered at him. “This has got to be the place. They’d come thousands of miles in their sleep just to hang out at the bar.”
Poole had the uneasy feeling that, without knowing it, Harry Beevers was describing Pat Caldwell, his ex-wife.
After Michael had rolled Conor onto the side of the bed the maid had not turned down, he pulled off his friend’s black running shoes and undid his belt. Conor moaned; his pale, veined eyelids fluttered. With his cropped red hair and pale skin, Conor Linklater seemed to be about nineteen years old: without his scraggly beard and moustache, he looked very like his Vietnam self. Poole covered Linklater with a spare blanket from the closet; then he switched on the lamp on the other side of the bed and turned off the overhead light. If Conor was to have slept on a couch in Pumo’s room, Pumo must have taken a suite—Poole’s own room did not offer a couch for the comfort of sodden visitors. Undoubtedly Beevers had also taken a suite. (Harry had never considered turning over his own couch to Conor.)
It was a few minutes to twelve. Poole turned on the television and turned down the volume, then sat in the closest chair and removed his own shoes. He draped his jacket over the back of the other chair. Charles Bronson was standing on the grassy verge of a road in a dainty, empty landscape that looked like western Ireland, looking through binoculars at a grey Mercedes-Benz pulled up in the gravel forecourt of a Georgian mansion. For a moment anticipatory silence surrounded the Mercedes, and then a bulging wall of flame obliterated the car.
Michael picked up the telephone and set it on the table beside him. The maid had lined up the bottles, stacked clear plastic glasses, removed the empties, and wrapped the plate of cheese in cellophane. In the bucket, one bottle of beer stood neck-deep in water, surrounded by floating slivers of ice. Michael dipped the topmost glass into the bucket and scooped up ice and water. He took a sip.
Conor muttered “googol” and rolled his face into his pillow.
On impulse Michael picked up the phone and dialed his wife’s private line at home. It was possible that Judy was lying awake in bed, reading something like The One-Minute Manager while successfully ignoring the television program she had turned on to keep her company.
Judy’s telephone rang once, then clicked as if someone had picked it up. Poole heard the mechanical hiss of tape, and knew that his wife had turned on her answering machine with its third-person message:
“Judy is unable to answer the telephone at this time, but if you leave your name, number, and message after the beep, she will get back to you as soon as possible.”
He waited for the beep.
“Judy, this is Michael. Are you home?” Judy’s machine was attached to the telephone in her study, adjacent to the bedroom. If she were awake in her bed, she would hear his voice. Judy did not respond; the tape whirred. Into the waiting machine he uttered a few mechanical sentences, ending by saying, “I’ll be home late Sunday night. Bye-bye.”
In bed, Michael read a few pages of the Stephen King novel he had packed. Conor Linklater complained and snuffled on the other side of the bed. Nothing in th
e novel seemed more than slightly odder or more threatening than events in ordinary life. Improbability and violence overflowed from ordinary life, and Stephen King seemed to know that.
Before Michael could turn off his light, he was dripping with sweat, carrying his copy of The Dead Zone through an army base many times larger than Camp Crandall. All around the camp, twenty or thirty kilometers beyond the barbed-wire perimeter, stood hills once thickly covered by trees, now so perfectly bombed and burned and defoliated that only charred sticks protruded upwards from powdery brown earth. He walked past a row of empty tents and at last heard the silence of the camp—he was alone. The camp had been abandoned, and he had been left behind. A flagless flagpole stood before the company headquarters. He trudged past the deserted building into a stretch of empty land and smelled burning shit. Then he knew that this was no dream, he really was in Vietnam—the rest of his life was the dream. Poole never smelled things in his dreams. He didn’t think he even dreamed in color most of the time. Poole turned around and saw an old Vietnamese woman looking at him expressionlessly from beside an oil drum filled with burning kerosene-soaked excrement. Dense black smoke boiled up from the drum and smudged the sky. His despair was flat and unsurprising.
Wait a second, he thought, if this is reality it’s no later than 1969. He opened The Dead Zone to the page of publishing information. Deep in his chest, his heart deflated like a punctured balloon. The copyright date was 1965. He had never left Vietnam. Everything since had been only a nineteen-year-old’s wishful dream.
1
Poole awoke with a fading memory of smoke and noise, of artillery fire and uniformed men running in a cartoonish lockstep through a burning village. He pushed this vision into forgetfulness with unconscious expertise. His first real thought was that he would stop off at Walden Books in Westerholm and buy a book for a twelve-year-old patient named Stacy Talbot before visiting her in St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. Then he remembered that he was in Washington. His second fully formed thought was to wonder if Tim Underhill was really still alive. He had a brief vision of himself standing in a neat graveyard in Singapore, looking down with both loss and relief at Underhill’s headstone.
Or was Underhill simmering in craziness, still back in the war?
Conor Linklater seemed to have vanished and left behind a crushed pillow and a wildly wrinkled counterpane. Poole crawled across the bed and peered over the far edge. Curled up into himself like a cabbage leaf, his mouth lax and his eyelids stretched unmoving across his eyes, Conor lay asleep on the floor.
Michael pushed himself back across the bed and went quietly into the bathroom to shower.
“Jeez,” Conor said when Michael came out of the bathroom. He was sitting in one of the chairs and holding his head in both hands. “What time is it, anyhow?”
“About ten-thirty.” Poole took underwear and socks from his bag and began dressing.
“Blackout, man,” Conor said. “Total hangover.” He peeked out through his fingers at Poole. “How’d I end up here, anyhow?”
“I sort of assisted you.”
“Thanks, man,” Linklater groaned. His head sank again into his hands. “I gotta turn over a new lease on life. I been partying too much lately, getting old, gotta slow down. Whoo.” He straightened up and looked around the room as if he were lost. “Where’s my clothes?”
“Pumo’s room,” Michael said, buttoning his shirt.
“Well, I don’t know. I left all my shit up there. I sure wish he’d come along with us, man, don’t you? Pumo the Puma. He oughta come along. Hey, Mikey, can I use your bathroom and your shower before I go back upstairs?”
“Oh dear,” Poole said. “I just got it all cleaned up for the maid.”
Conor left the couch and moved across the room in a fashion that Poole associated with recovering stroke victims in geriatric wards. When Conor got to the bathroom he leaned on the doorknob and coughed. His hair was standing up in little orange spikes. “Am I crazy, or did Beans say he’d loan me a couple thousand bucks?”
Poole nodded.
“Do you think he meant it?”
Poole nodded again.
“I’ll never figure that guy out, I guess,” Conor said, and slammed the bathroom door behind him.
After he pushed his feet into his loafers, Poole went to the telephone and dialed Judy’s number. She did not answer, nor did her machine. Poole hung up.
A few minutes later Beevers called down to inform Michael and Conor that he was offering room-service breakfast for everybody in his suite (en suite), commencing in thirty minutes at eleven hundred hours, and that Michael had better get hopping if he wanted more than one Bloody Mary.
“More than one?”
“I guess you didn’t get the kind of exercise I had last night,” Beevers gloated. “A lovely lady, the kind I was telling you about, left about an hour or two ago, and I’m as mellow as a month in the country. Michael—try to persuade Pumo that there are more important things in the world than his restaurant, will you?” He hung up before Poole could respond.
2
Beevers’ suite had not only a long living room with sliding windows onto a substantial balcony but was equipped with a dining room where Michael, Pumo, and Beevers sat at a round table laden with plates of food, baskets of rolls, racks of toast, pitchers of Bloody Marys, chafing dishes holding sausages, bacon, and eggs Benedict.
From the couch in the living room where he sat hunched over a cup of black coffee, Conor said, “I’ll eat something later.”
“Mangia, mangia. Keep your strength up for our trip.” Beevers waggled a fork dripping egg yolk and Hollandaise sauce. His black hair gleamed and his eyes shone. His white shirt had been fresh from its wrapping when Beevers had rolled up his sleeves and his soberly striped bow tie was perfectly knotted. The dark blue suit jacket draped over the back of his chair had a broad chalky stripe. He looked as though he expected to be standing before the Supreme Court instead of the Vietnam Memorial.
“You’re still serious about that?” Pumo asked.
“Aren’t you? Tina, we need you—how could we do this without you?”
“You’re going to have to try,” Pumo said. “But isn’t the question academic anyhow?”
“Not to me, it isn’t,” Beevers said. “How about you, Conor? You think I’m just kidding around?”
The three men at the table looked down the length of the living room toward Conor. Startled at being the object of everyone’s attention, he straightened himself up. “Not if you’re loaning me the air fare, you’re not,” he said. “Kidding, that is.”
Beevers was now quizzing Michael with his annoyingly clear, annoyingly amused eyes. “And you? Was sagen Sie, Michael?”
“Do you ever exactly kid around, Harry?” Michael asked, unwilling to be a counter in Harry Beevers’ newest game.
Beevers was still gleaming at him, waiting for more because he knew he was going to get it.
“I suppose I’m tempted, Harry,” he said, and caught Pumo’s sidelong glance.
3
“Just out of curiosity,” Harry Beevers leaned forward to say to the cabdriver, “how do the four of us strike you? What sort of impression do you have of us as a group?”
“You serious?” the cabbie asked, and turned to Poole, seated beside him on the front seat. “Is this guy serious?”
Poole nodded, and Beevers said, “Go on. Lay it on the line. I’m curious.”
The driver looked at Beevers in the mirror, looked back at the road, then glanced back over his shoulder at Pumo and Linklater. The driver was an unshaven, blubbery man in his mid-fifties. Whenever he made even the smallest movement, Poole caught the mingled odors of dried sweat and burning electrical circuits.
“You guys don’t fit together at all, no way,” the driver said. He looked suspiciously over at Poole. “Hey, if this is ‘Candid Camera’ or some shit like that, you can get out now.”
“What do you mean, we don’t fit together?” Beevers asked. “We’
re a unit!”
“Here’s what I see.” The driver glanced again at his mirror. “You look like some kind of bigshot lawyer, maybe a lobbyist or some other kind of guy who starts out in life by stealing from the collection plate. The guy next to you looks like a pimp, and the guy next to him is a working stiff with a hangover. This one here next to me, he looks like he teaches high school.”
“A pimp!” Pumo howled.
“So sue me,” said the driver. “You asked.”
“I am a working stiff with a hangover,” Conor said. “And face it, Tina, you are a pimp.”
“I got it right, huh?” the driver said. “What do I win? You guys are from ‘Wheel of Fortune,’ right?”
“Are you serious?” Beevers asked.
“I asked first,” said the driver.
“No, I wanted to know—” Beevers began, but Conor told him to shut up.
The cabdriver smirked to himself the rest of the way to Constitution Avenue. “This is close enough,” Beevers said. “Pull over.”
“I thought you wanted the Memorial.”
“I said, pull over.”
The cabbie swerved to the side of the road and jerked to a stop. “Could you arrange for me to meet Vanna White?” he asked into the mirror.
“Get stuffed,” Beevers said, and jumped out of the cab. “Pay him, Tina.” He held the door until Pumo and Linklater left the car, then slammed it shut. “I hope you didn’t tip that asshole,” he said.
Pumo shrugged.
“Then you’re an asshole too.” Beevers turned away and stomped off in the direction of the Memorial.
Poole hurried to catch up with him.
“So what did I say?” Beevers asked, almost snarling. “I didn’t say anything wrong. The guy was a jerk, that’s all. I should have kicked his teeth in.”
“Calm down, Harry.”