Koko

by Peter Straub

  None of them did.

  “You want to hear the worst? The worst thing? I said his butcher shop was next to the house on Muffin Street? You want to guess what the name of the butcher shop was?”

  “The Blood of the Lamb Butcher Shop,” Maggie said.

  “Wow,” Debbie said. “So close. Any other tries?”

  “Lamb of God,” Poole said. “The Lamb of God Butcher Shop.”

  “Dengler’s Lamb of God Butcher Shop,” Debbie said. “How did you know?”

  “The Messiah,” Poole said. “ ‘Behold the lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world.’ ”

  “ ‘All we like sheep have gone astray,’ ” Maggie said.

  “My husband sure did.” She gave Poole a grim little smile. “I guess old Vic probably did too, didn’t he?”

  Poole asked for the check. Debbie Tusa took a compact out of her bag and inspected herself in its mirror.

  “Did you ever hear Vic or anybody else sing something like rip-a-rip-a-rip-a-lo or pompo, pompo, polo, polo …?”

  Debbie was staring at him over the top of her compact. “Is that the song of the pink elephants? Honestly. I gotta get back home. You guys feel like coming over to my place?”

  Poole said that they had other appointments. Debbie struggled into her coat, hugged each of them, and told Maggie that she was so cute, it was no wonder she was lucky too. She waved good-bye from the door of the restaurant.

  “If there’s nothing to do now, I could go back to the hotel and work on some notes,” Underhill said.

  Maggie suggested that they try to call Dengler’s mother.

  3

  “I said we just wanted to talk to her,” Poole said, turning into Muffin Street. It was two shabby blocks long, the Old Log Cabin Tavern at one end, the Up ‘N’ Under at the other. Half of the buildings were small businesses; in half of these the windows had been boarded up and the signs had faded into blurs. A peeling frame building with a small front porch, like the Spitalny house, but listing to one side and so grimy it seemed almost to have been draped in cobwebs, number 53 leaned against a square smaller building with a sheet of plywood where it had once had a window. The Reverend Dengler had located the Lamb of God Butcher Shop two blocks away from the nearest shopping street, and like the TV repair shop two blocks away and Irma’s Dress Shop it had quietly gone out of business.

  “Nice,” Maggie said as she got out of the car. “Very romantic.”

  They had to pick their way through the snow. Muffin Street had been plowed, but few of the sidewalks had been shoveled clean. The steps sagged and complained as they went up onto the porch. The front door opened before Poole could push the bell.

  “Hello, Mrs. Dengler,” Tim said.

  A pale white-haired woman in a blue wool dress was looking out through the crack in the door, squinting because of the cold and the brightness of the fresh snow. Her hair was in tight tiny curls that had been dusted with powder.

  “Mrs. Dengler?” Poole asked.

  She nodded. Her face was square and private, white as a paper cup. The only color was in the almost transparent pale blue of her wide-set eyes, as odd in a human face as the eyes of a dog. They appeared slightly magnified behind a pair of round old-fashioned glasses. “I’m Helga Dengler,” she said in a voice that struggled to be welcoming. For a second, Poole thought her voice was his wife’s. “You’d better get in out of the cold.” She moved no more than two or three inches out of the way and as Poole squeezed past her he saw the white flecks of powder in her hair sift down to the white scalp.

  “You’re the one who called? Dr. Poole?”

  “Yes, and—”

  “Who’s that one? You didn’t tell me about that one.”

  “Maggie Lah. She is a close friend of ours.”

  The odd pale dog’s eyes inspected him. Poole had become aware of a close, dank, musty smell as soon as the door closed. Mrs. Dengler’s nose was upturned and very broad, with three deep creases across its top just beneath the bridge of the old-fashioned glasses. She had virtually no lips, and her neck was very thick. Her shoulders too were thick, sturdy, and bent forward in a permanent stoop.

  “I’m just an old woman who lives alone, that’s all I am. Now, now. Yes. Come along.” With little phrases she motioned them toward a coat rack and stood rubbing her hands over her wide upper arms. In the darkness of the hallway Mrs. Dengler’s large square face seemed to shine, as if it drew all the light in the house to it.

  Helga Dengler’s pale eyes moved from Poole to Maggie to Underhill and back to Maggie. There was a sense of heavy shapelessness about her, as if she were far heavier than she looked. “So,” she said. A staircase, in the darkness no more than an impression of a wooden handrail and newel posts, rose into the gloom at her back. The floor was slightly gritty underfoot. Dim light came through a half-open door down the hall.

  “You’re very kind to have invited us, Mrs. Dengler,” Poole said, and Maggie and Tim Underhill said similar things that tangled together in the air and then broke off.

  As if their words had reached her after a delay, for a moment she merely gleamed at them. Then: “Well, the Bible tells us to be kind, doesn’t it? You men knew my son?”

  “He was a wonderful person,” Poole said.

  “We loved your son,” Underhill said at the same moment, and their sentences also tangled together.

  “Well,” she said. Poole thought that he could look all the way through her eyes and see nothing but the clear blue color of blue jeans washed a thousand times. Then he thought that their queer awkwardness was forced on them by her: that she had wished it upon them.

  “Manny tried to be a good boy,” she said. “He had to be trained to it, like all boys.”

  Again Poole had the sense of a missed beat, of a second that fell either into Helga Dengler or out of the world altogether.

  “You’ll want to sit down,” she said. “I guess the living room is where you’ll want to go. This way. I’m busy, you see. An old woman who lives alone has to keep herself busy.”

  “Have we interrupted something?” Poole asked. She smiled her hard twitch of a smile and motioned for them to follow her down the hall and through the door.

  One low-wattage bulb burned beneath an ornate lampshade. The single bar of an electrical heater glowed red in the corner of the crowded room. Here the musty odor was not so noticeable. The furniture seemed to glow and ripple. Purple stained-glass tiger’s eyes shone down from little shelves and from a table beside a couch of worn plush. “You can all sit there, it used to be my mother’s.” The rippling glow was reflected light streaking across stiff clear plastic covers which creaked when they sat down.

  Poole looked sideways at the tiger’s eyes on the round table and saw that they were marbles, cracked on the inside in such a way that they caught the yellow light. There were dozens of them fixed in an arrangement on a piece of black cloth.

  “That’s my work,” the woman said. She was standing in the center of the room. On the wall behind her was a framed photograph of a uniformed man who in the general darkness resembled a Boy Scout leader. Other pictures, of puppies tumbled together and kittens entangled in yarn, had been placed in random positions on the walls.

  “You can have your opinion, and I’ll have mine,” Mrs. Dengler said. She took a half-step forward, and her eyes seemed to swell behind the round lenses. “Everybody’s entitled to their opinion, that’s what we told them over and over again.”

  “Excuse me?” Michael said. Underhill was smiling either at Mrs. Dengler or at the pictures only half-visible behind her. “You said … your work?”

  She visibly relaxed, and stepped backwards again. “My grape clusters. You were looking.”

  “Oh,” Poole said. That was what they were. The purple marbles, he saw, had been glued to the black fabric in the shape of a cluster of grapes. “Very nice.”

  “Everybody always thought so. When my husband had his church, some of the congregation used to buy my grape clusters
. Everybody always said they were beautiful. The way they catch the light.”

  “Beautiful,” Poole said.

  “How do you make them?” Maggie asked.

  This time her smile seemed genuine, almost delicate, as if she knew she took an immodest amount of pride in her grape clusters. “You could do it yourself,” she said, and finally sat down on a footstool. “It’s in a pan. I always use Wesson oil. You use butter, it spatters. And it burns. My husband would use butter for everything, but he had the feeling for meat, you see. You use that Wesson oil, little girl, and you’ll always get your marbles to crack in the right way. That’s what nobody understands—especially in these times. You must do things right.”

  “So you fry the marbles,” Maggie said.

  “Well … yes. You use your pan and your Wesson oil. And you use low heat. That way they crack all the same way. That’s the good part of it. They all turn out just right. Then you turn them out of the pan and run cold water over them for a second or two, that seems to set them somehow, and after they cool down you glue them to your form. A dot of glue, that’s it. And then you’ve got your cluster, a beautiful thing for all eternity.” She beamed at Maggie, all the light concentrated in the heavy, thick center of her face. “For … all … eternity. Like the Word of God. Each one takes twenty-four marbles. To come out exactly right and lifelike too. Well. Better than lifelike, in some ways.”

  “Being all alike,” Maggie said.

  “All just alike. That’s the beauty part. With boys, you know, you can just try and try. You can do what you will, but they will resist.” Her face closed up for a moment, and the center of her face seemed to dim. “Nothing in life comes out the way you expect, not even for Christians. You’re a Christian, aren’t you, little girl?”

  Maggie blinked and said oh yes, of course.

  “These men pretend, but they haven’t fooled me. I can smell the beer on them. A Christian man doesn’t drink beer. My Karl never touched a drop of liquor, and my Manny never did either. At least not until he got away, into the service.” She glared at Poole as if she held him personally responsible for her son’s lapses. “And never mixed with bad women, either. We beat that into him. He was a good boy, as good as we could make him. And considering where and what he came from.” Another sullen look at Poole, as if he knew all about that. “We got that boy to work, and work he did until the day the army took him. School is school, we said, but your work is your life. Butcher-work came from God, but man made schoolwork and reading any book but one.”

  “Was he happy as a child?” Poole asked.

  “The Devil worries about happiness,” she said, and the weird pale light went on in her face and eyes again. “Do you think Karl thought about such as that? Do you think I did? Those are the questions the other ones asked. Now you tell me something, Dr. Poole, and I’ll rely on you to tell me the truth. Did that boy drink liquor in the service over there? And did he waste himself with women? Because in your answer I’ll know what sort of man he was, and what sort you are too. The bad marbles crack all wrong, oh yes. The bad marble falls to pieces in the fire. The mother was one of those. Tell me—answer my question, or you can leave this house. I let you in, you’re not a policeman or a judge. My opinions are as good as yours, in case they’re not a lot better.”

  “Of course,” Poole said. “No, I don’t think I can remember your son ever taking a drink. And he remained … what you would call pure.”

  “Well. Yes. Yes, he did. This one thing I know. Manny stayed pure. What I would call pure,” she added, with a blast of ice straight from her eyes into Poole’s heart.

  Poole wondered how she could have known that before he told her, and if she had known why she had asked. “We’d like to tell you some things about your son,” he said, and his words sounded clumsy and ill-chosen.

  “Go on,” the woman said, and again used her peculiar psychic strength to alter both herself and the atmosphere in the room. She seemed to sigh inaudibly: both her thick body and the air grew heavier, as if filled up with dull unexpectant waiting. “You want to tell your story, so tell it.”

  “Did we interrupt your work, Mrs. Dengler?” Maggie asked.

  A gleam of satisfaction. “I turned off my stove. It can wait. You people are here. You know what I think? We trained him more than most would, and some didn’t care for what we did. You can’t put your faith in what others say. Muffin Street is a world like many others. Muffin Street is real. You go ahead now.”

  “Mrs. Dengler,” Tim said, “your son was a wonderful human being. He was a hero under fire, and more than that, he was compassionate and inventive—”

  “You think backwards,” she broke in. “Oh, my. Backwards. Inventive? You mean he made things up. Isn’t that part of the original trouble? Would there have been a trial, if he hadn’t made things up?”

  “I would never defend his being court-martialed,” Tim said, “but I don’t think you can blame it on him, either.”

  “Imagination has to be stopped. You’re talking about imagination. You have to put an end to that. That’s one thing I know. And Karl knew it, up until the day he passed away.” She turned almost in agitation to look at the rows of identical grape clusters, each grape with its identical flare of light within. “Well. Go on. You want to. You came all the way to do it.”

  Underhill talked about Dragon Valley, and the stories that had eased George Spitalny at first left her unmoved, then seemed to distress her. Pink crept into the whiteness of her face: her eyes zapped into Poole’s, and he saw that it was not distress that made her flush, but anger.

  So much for the gods of storytelling, he thought.

  “Manny’s behavior was fantastic, and he mocked his officer. Behavior should never be fantastic, and he should have respected the officer.”

  “The whole situation was a little fantastic,” Underhill said.

  “That is what people say when they try to excuse themselves. Wherever the boy was, he should have acted as if he were on Muffin Street. Pride is a sin. We would have punished him.”

  Poole could feel Tim’s anger and sorrow even through Maggie Lah, who sat between them.

  “Mrs. Dengler,” Maggie said, “a moment ago you said that Manny was a good boy, considering where he came from.”

  The old woman lifted her head like an animal sniffing the wind. Unmistakable pleasure shone through her round eyeglasses. “Little girls can listen, can’t they?”

  “You didn’t mean Muffin Street, did you?”

  “Manny didn’t come from Muffin Street. So.”

  Maggie waited for what was to come next, and Poole wondered what it would be. Mars? Russia? Heaven?

  “Manny came from the gutter,” Mrs. Dengler said. “We took that boy out of the gutter and we gave him a home. We gave him our name. We gave him our religion. We fed him and we clothed him. Does that sound like the work of bad people? Do you think bad people would have done that for an abandoned little boy?”

  “You adopted him?”

  Underhill was leaning backwards against the stiff plastic, staring intently at Helga Dengler.

  “We adopted that poor abandoned child and we gave him new life. Do you think his mother could have had my coloring? Are you such fools? Karl was blond too, before he went grey. Karl was an angel of God, with his yellow hair and his flowing beard! Yes! I will show you.”

  She all but hopped to her feet, glowered down at them with her X-ray eyes, and left the room. It was like a grotesque parody of their evening with the Spitalnys. “Did he ever say anything to you about being adopted?” Poole asked.

  Underhill shook his head.

  “Manuel Orosco Dengler,” Maggie said. “You must have known something was going on.”

  “We never called him that,” Poole said.

  Mrs. Dengler opened the door, admitting a whiff of the odor of damp wood along with herself. She was clutching an old photograph album made of pressed cardboard treated to resemble leather. The corners and edges had frayed, showing
the blunted grey edges of the layers of compressed paper. She came forward eagerly, open-mouthed, like a wronged defendant to the judge. “Now you see my Karl,” she said, opening the album to an early page and turning it around to face them.

  The photograph took up nearly the entire page. It might have been taken a hundred years earlier. A tall man with lank pale hair that hung past his ears and a pale unruly beard glared at the camera. He was thin but broad-shouldered and wore a dark suit that hung on him like a sack. He looked driven, haunted, intense. The nature of this man’s religion rose off the photograph like steam. Where his wife’s eyes looked through you to another world, dismissing everything between herself and it, his looked straight into hell and condemned you to it.

  “Karl was a man of God,” Helga said. “You can see that plainly. He was chosen. My Karl was not a lazy man. You can see that too. He was not soft. He never shirked his duty, not even when his duty was to stand on a street corner in below zero weather. The News would not wait for fine weather, and it needed a hard, dedicated man to tell it, and that was my Karl. So we needed help. Someday we would be old. But we didn’t know what was going to happen to us!” She was panting, and her eyes bulged behind the round glasses. Again Poole felt that her body was gathering density, pulling into it all the air in the room and along with it all that ever was or ever would be right or moral, leaving them forever in the wrong.

  “Who were his parents?” Poole heard Underhill ask, and knew that she would misunderstand.

  “Fine people. Who would have had such a son? Strong people. Karl’s father was also a butcher, he taught him the trade, and Karl taught Manny the trade so that Manny could work for us while we did the Lord’s own work. We raised him from the gutter and gave him eternal life, so. He was to work for us and provide for our old age.”

  “I see,” said Underhill, bending forward slightly to glance at Michael. “We’d also like to know something about your son’s parents.”

  Mrs. Dengler folded the photograph album shut and laid it across her lap. Some of the musty smell had permeated the cardboard, and for a moment the odor eddied about them.