Koko

by Peter Straub

  “I got a funny feeling the minute I laid eyes on the field. It looked like death. That’s the best I can say. It looked like a goddamned graveyard. It had that fixin’-to-die smell—maybe you know what I mean. I bet if you go to the pound and get into that room where they kill the dogs nobody wants, you’d get that same smell. Then I saw a helmet liner lying out next to a shell crater. A little way off from it I saw the busted-off stock of an M-16.

  “ ‘Suppose we explore this piece of real estate and see what’s on the other side before we go back to camp,’ Beevers said. ‘Looks good, doesn’t it?’

  “ ‘Lieutenant,’ Poole said, ‘I think this field is probably mined.’ He saw what I did, see?

  “ ‘Do you?’ Beevers asked. ‘Then why don’t you go out there first, Poole? You just volunteered to be our point man.’

  “Fortunately, Poole and I weren’t the only ones who had seen the helmet liner and the stock. They wouldn’t let Poole go out there by himself, and they weren’t about to try it for themselves either.

  “ ‘You think this field is mined?’ Beevers asked.”

  “You men think this field is mined?” screamed Lieutenant Beevers. “You actually think I’ll fall for that one? This is a struggle for command, and like it or not, I’m in command here.”

  Grinning, Dengler turned to Puma and whispered, “Don’t you love the way his mind works?”

  “Dengler whispered something to me, and Beevers blew up. ‘Okay,’ he yelled at Dengler, ‘if you think this area is mined, prove it to me. Throw something out there and hit a mine. If nothing blows up, we all go into the field.’ ‘Whatever you say,’ Dengler said—”

  “As the lieutenant wishes,” Dengler said, and looked around him in the gloom. “Throw the lieutenant,” Victor Spitalny muttered. Dengler saw a good-sized rock buried in the muck near him, pushed it free with his boot, bent down, put his arms around it, and lifted it.

  “—and he picked up a rock about the size of his head. Beevers was getting madder by the second. He told Dengler to heave the goddamned thing out into the field, and Poole came up next to Dengler to take half the weight. They did a one-two-three and heaved the thing maybe twenty yards. Everybody but the lieutenant fell down and covered his face. I heard the rock land with a thud. Nothing. I think we all expected a pressure mine to send shrapnel off in all directions. When nothing happened, we picked ourselves up. Beevers was standing there smirking. ‘Well, girls,’ he said. ‘Satisfied now? Need more proof?’ And then he did an amazing thing—he took off his helmet and kissed it. ‘Follow this, it has more balls than you do,’ he said, and he cocked his arm back and tossed his helmet as far as he could out into the field. We all watched it sail up. By the time it started to descend, we could hardly see it anymore.”

  They watched the lieutenant’s helmet disappear into the grey air and the swarming bugs. By the time the helmet hit the ground it was nearly invisible. The explosion surprised them all, except at that level where they could no longer be surprised by anything. Again, all except Beevers flopped into the muck. A column of red fire flashed upward and the ground bounced under their feet. Set off either by a malfunction or by the vibration, another mine detonated a beat after the first, and a chunk of metal whizzed past Beevers’ face, so close he could feel its heat. He either fell down on purpose or collapsed in shock next to Poole. He was panting. Everyone in the platoon could smell the acrid stink of the two explosions. For a moment everything was still. Tina Pumo lifted his head, half-expecting another of the mines to go off, and as he did so he heard the insects begin their drilling again. For a moment Tina thought he could see Lieutenant Beevers’ helmet out on the far end of the mined field, lying miraculously undamaged though somehow stuffed with leaves beside a twisted branch. Then he saw that the leaves formed a pattern of eyes and eyebrows inside the helmet. Finally he saw that they were real eyes and eyebrows. The helmet was still on a dead soldier’s head. What he had taken for a branch was a severed arm in a sleeve. The explosion had unearthed a partially buried and dismembered corpse.

  From the other end of the field a loud inquisitive voice called out in Vietnamese. Another voice screeched in laughter, and joyfully shouted back.

  “I think we’re in a situation here, Lieutenant,” Dengler whispered. Poole had taken his map out of its wax case and was running his fingers along trails, trying to figure out exactly where they were.

  Looking across the field at the American head which had floated in its American helmet out of the substance of the field, Poole saw a series of abrupt, inexplicable movements of the earth—as if invisible rodents tore around, roiling the sodden earth here, tossing spears of grass there. Something trembled the log near the field’s far end and pushed it backwards an inch or two. Then he finally realized that the platoon was being fired on from the rear.

  “There were a couple of explosions, and a lot of yelling in Vietnamese from all around us—I think they had let us just blunder along without being really certain of where we were. Beevers’ radio silence at least did that much. The ones behind us started shooting, and probably the only thing that saved our lives was that they weren’t sure where we were, exactly, so they put their fire where they thought we were, the same field where they’d wiped out nearly a whole company a week before. And their fire exploded maybe eighty percent of the mines they had buried with the American bodies.”

  It looked as if underground fireworks were destroying the field. There came a staggered, arhythmic series of double explosions, the booming thud of the shell answered immediately by the flat, sharp crack of the mine. Yellow-red flashes engulfed orange-red flashes, then both flashes drowned in a boil of smoke and a gout of earth, throwing up a ribcage lashed against a web belt, an entire leg still wearing a trouser leg and a boot.

  “Why did they booby-trap the dead bodies?” Maggie whispered.

  “Because they knew that someone would come back for them. You always come back for your dead. It’s one of the only decent things about war. You bring your dead back with you.”

  “Like going after Tim Underhill?”

  “No, not at all. Well, maybe. I suppose.” He extended his arm. Maggie rested her head on it and snuggled closer to him.

  “Two guys got blown to pieces as soon as we started moving into the field. Beevers ordered us forward, and he was right, because they were readjusting their fire to blast the shit out of us where we were. The first guy to go was a kid named Cal Hill who had just joined up with us, and the other was a guy named Tattoo Tiano. I never knew his real name, but he was a good soldier. So Tattoo got killed right away. Right next to me. There was this blast that almost tore my head off when Tattoo set off the mine, and honest to God the air turned bright red for a second. He really was right next to me. I thought I was dead. I couldn’t see or hear anything. There was nothing but this red mist all around me. Then I heard the other one go off, and I could hear it when Hill started screaming. ‘Move your tail, Pumo,’ Dengler yelled. ‘You still got it, move it.’ Norm Peters, our medic, somehow got over to Hill and tried to do something for him. I finally noticed that I was all wet, covered with Tattoo’s blood. We started getting a little light fire from up ahead, so we got our weapons off our backs and returned fire. Artillery rounds started landing back in the fringe of jungle we had just left. I could see Poole yelling into his radio. The fire got a little heavier. We scattered out through the field and hunkered down behind whatever we could find. Along with a few other people I flattened out behind the fallen tree. I could see Peters wrapping up Cal Hill, trying to stop his blood loss, and it looked inside out to me—it looked like Peters was torturing Hill, squeezing the blood out of him. Hill was screaming his head off. We were demons, they were demons, everybody was demons, there were no people left in the world anymore, only demons. Hill sort of didn’t have any middle—where his stomach and guts and his cock should have been there was only this flat red puddle. Hill could see what had happened to him, and he couldn’t believe it. He wasn’t in Nam
long enough to believe it! ‘Stop that man screaming!’ Beevers yelled. Some more light fire came at us from ahead, and then we heard someone shouting at us from up there. ‘Rock ’n roar,’ this guy was shouting, ‘Rock ’n roar!’ ‘Elvis,’ Dengler said, and a whole bunch of guys started yelling at him, and squeezed off a couple of shots. Because this was the sniper who had appointed himself our official assassin. He was one amazing shot, let me tell you. I raised up and got off a shot, but I knew it wasn’t any good. M-16s used these little 5.56 millimeter bullets instead of 7.62 rounds, and so the cartridge clips were easier to carry, eleven ounces instead of more than twice that, but the rounds spun in the air, so they wobbled like crazy once they went a certain distance. In some ways, the old M-14 was better—not only did it have better distance, you could actually aim an M-14. So I squeezed off some rounds, but I was pretty sure that even if I could see old Elvis, I wouldn’t be able to hit him. But at least I’d have the satisfaction of knowing what he looked like. Anyhow, so there we were, stuck in a minefield between a lot of NVA, maybe a couple of companies working their way south to link up with whatever they had in the A Shau Valley. Not to mention Elvis. And Poole couldn’t tell anybody where we were, because not only had the lieutenant gotten us lost, his radio had been hit and the fucker was no good anymore. So we were locked in. We spent the next fifteen hours in a field full of dead men—with a lieutenant who was losing his mind.”

  “Oh God oh God,” Pumo heard the lieutenant repeating over and over. Calvin Hill noisily continued to die, screaming as if Peters were poking hot needles through his tongue. Other men were screaming too. Pumo could not see who they were, and he did not want to know who they were. Part of Pumo wanted to stand up and get killed and get it over with, and part of him was as scared of this feeling as of anything else that had happened. He made the interesting discovery that there are layers of terror, each one colder and more paralyzing than the one before it. Mortar rounds landed in the field at regular intervals, and machine-gun fire now and then sprayed in from the sides. Pumo and everyone else huddled in whatever troughs, shellholes, or bunkers they half-found, half dug for themselves. Pumo had finally seen the lieutenant’s ruined helmet: it rested against the kneecap of a dead soldier who had been lifted out of the ground by an exploding mine. His kneecap, attached to his calf but to nothing else and white beneath its coating of grime, lay on the ground only inches from the soldier’s head and shoulders, likewise attached to nothing else. The dead soldier was looking at Pumo. His face was very dirty. His eyes were open, and he looked stupid and hungry. Every time the ground rumbled and the sky split apart with a new explosion, the head tilted a little more toward Pumo and the shoulders swam across the ground toward him.

  Pumo flattened himself against the ground. The coldest, deepest layer of terror told him that when the dead soldier finally swam up and touched him, he’d die. Then he saw Tim Underhill crawling toward the lieutenant and wondered why he bothered. The sky was full of tracers and explosion. Night had come on in an instant. The lieutenant was going to die. Underhill was going to die. Everybody was going to die. That was the great secret. He seemed to hear M.O. Dengler saying something to Poole and laughing. Laughing? Pumo was intensely aware, as the world darkened and swooned around the impossibility ofthat laugh, of the odor of Tattoo Tiano’s blood. ‘Did the lieutenant shit in his nice new pants?’ Underhill said. ‘Mike, get your radio to work, will you?’ Dengler asked in a very reasonable voice.

  A huge explosion rocked Pumo as it tore apart the sky. The air turned white, red, deep black. Womanish-sounding screams came from a soldier Pumo could immediately identify as Tony Ortega, Spacemaker Ortega, a good but brutal soldier who in civilian life had been the leader of a motocycle gang called the Devilfuckers in upstate New York. Ortega had been Victor Spitalny’s only friend in the platoon, and now Spitalny would have no friends. Pumo realized that this didn’t matter, Spitalny would get killed with the rest of them. Spacemaker Ortega’s screams gradually sank into the dark, as if he were being carried away. “What are we going to do, what are we going to do, oh God oh God,” Beevers wailed. “Oh God oh God oh God, I don’t want to die, I don’t I don’t I can’t die.”

  Peters crawled away from the dead Ortega. In a sudden loud burst of light Pumo saw him moving toward a twitching man ten or twelve yards off. Another land mine inaudibly went off, for the ground shook and the dead man swam a few inches nearer Pumo.

  A soldier named Teddy Wallace announced that he was going to waste that fucker Elvis, and a friend of his named Tom Blevins said he’d follow. Pumo saw the two soldiers rise into crouches and take off across the field. Before he had gone eight steps, Wallace stepped on a pressure mine and was torn apart from crotch to chest. Wallace’s left leg blew sideways and seemed to run above the field for a short time before it fell. Tom Blevins got a few steps further before he pitched over as neatly as if he had tripped over piano wire. “Rock ‘n roar!” Elvis shouted from up in the trees.

  Suddenly Pumo became aware that Dengler was beside him. Dengler was grinning. “Don’t you think God does all things simultaneously?” Dengler asked him.

  “What?” he asked. Life doesn’t make sense, he thought, the world doesn’t make sense, war doesn’t make sense, everything is only a terrible joke. Death was the great secret at the bottom of the joke, and demons watched the world and capered and laughed.

  “What I like about that idea is that in a funny way it means that the universe actually created itself, which means that it goes on creating itself, get me? So destruction is part of this creation that goes on all the time. And on top of that is the real kicker, Pumo—destruction is the part of creation that we think is beautiful.”

  “Get fucked,” Pumo said. Now he understood what Dengler was doing: talking nonsense to wake him up and make him capable of acting. Dengler didn’t understand that the demons had made the world, and that death was their big secret.

  Pumo became aware that he had not spoken in a long time. His eyes were filled with tears. “Are you awake, Maggie?” he whispered.

  Maggie breathed on easily and quietly, her perfect round head still resting on his shoulder.

  “That bastard stole my address book,” Pumo whispered. “Why the hell would she want my address book? So she can steal clock radios and portable televisions from everyone I know?”

  In a carrying voice, Underhill said, “The demons are abroad and Dengler is trying to convince Pumo that death is the mother of beauty—”

  “No, I’m not,” Dengler whispered, “you got it wrong, that’s not it, beauty has no mother.”

  “Jesus,” Pumo said, and wondered how Underhill knew about the demons, he must have seen them too.

  Another great light exploded in the sky, and he could see the surviving members of the platoon lying as if frozen in a snapshot, their faces turned to Underhill, who seemed as calm, peaceful, and massive as a mountain. There was another secret here, a secret as deep as the one the demons had, but what was it? Their own dead, and the booby-trapped dead of the other company, lay sprawled all over the field. No, the demons are deeper, Pumo thought, because this isn’t just hell, this is worse than hell—in hell you’re dead and in this hell we still have to wait for other people to kill us.

  Norm Peters scurried back and forth, plugging sucking chest wounds. Then darkness enclosed them again. When another giant light illuminated the sky a few seconds later, Pumo saw that Dengler had left him and was following Peters around, helping him. Dengler was smiling. He saw Pumo staring at him, and grinned and pointed upwards. Shine on, he meant, shine on, remember everything, the universe is making itself up right now.

  Late at night the NVA began dropping in 60-mm shells from the M-2 mortars that had been taken from the American company. Several times in the hour before morning Pumo knew that he had gone stone crazy. The demons had come back, and roamed laughing through the field. Pumo finally understood that they were laughing at him and Dengler, for even if they lived through this nig
ht they would not be saved from dying senseless deaths, and if all things were simultaneous their deaths were present now, and memory was a twisted joke. He saw Victor Spitalny sawing the ears off Spacemaker Ortega, the former ruler of the Devilfuckers, and that made the demons dance and cackle too. “What the fuck are you doing?” he hissed, and picked up a clod of earth and threw it at him. “That was your best friend!”

  “I gotta have somethin’ to show for this,” Spitalny said, but he gave up anyhow, shoved his knife back in his belt and scuttled away like a jackal surprised at his feast of carrion.

  When the helicopters finally came in the NVA company had disappeared back into the jungle, and the Cobras, the gun-ships, merely slammed a half-dozen rockets into the canopy and fried a few monkeys before wheeling grandly in the air and returning to Camp Crandall. The other helicopter descended over the clearing.

  You never remembered how almost tranquil a UH1-B was until you were in one again.

  3

  “To tell you the truth, we’re New York City policemen,” Beevers said to the taxi driver, a gaunt, toothless Chinese in a T-shirt who had just asked why they wanted to go to Boogey Street.

  “Ah,” the driver said. “Policemen.”

  “We’re here on a case.”

  “On a case,” said the driver. “Very good. This for television?”

  “We’re looking for an American who liked Boogey Street,” Poole hastily explained. Beevers’ face had turned red and his mouth was a thin line. “We know he moved to Singapore. So we’d like to show his picture around on Boogey Street to see if anybody knows him.”

  “Boogey Street no good for you,” the driver said.

  “I’m getting out of this cab,” Beevers said. “I can’t stand it anymore. Stop. Pull over. We’re getting out.”