Koko

by Peter Straub

Maggie and her friends veered into the side aisle lined with refrigerated cases. The neon sign shed pale blue light over them. Harry remembered that he had entered this store to buy a bottle of champagne as a sweetener for Pat when he saw Maggie open the glass doors of a refrigerated case. On her face was an expression of sweetly concentrated attention. She plucked out a bottle of Dom Perignon and slid it instantly into her clothes, where it disappeared. The theft of the bottle had taken something like a second and a half. Harry had a sudden picture, vividly clear, of the dark, cold bottle of Dom Perignon nestled between Maggie’s breasts.

  Without any premeditation of any kind, Harry slammed open the glass door and yanked out another bottle of Dom Perignon. He remembered the mystically smiling face of the Vietnamese girl moving toward him through Saigon’s kitchen door. He shoved the bottle beneath his suit jacket, where it bulged. Maggie Lah and her ratty friends had begun to stroll toward the rank of cash registers at the front of the store. Harry thrust his hand inside his coat, upended the bottle, and jammed its neck into his trousers. Then he buttoned his jacket and coat. The bulge had become only slightly conspicuous. He began following Maggie toward the cash registers.

  The clerks at the few working registers punched buttons and pushed wine bottles down the moving belts. Maggie and the others sailed past an empty counter and a uniformed security guard lounging against the plate-glass window. As Harry watched, they vanished through the door.

  “Hey, Maggie!” he yelled. He trotted past the nearest unattended cash register. “Maggie!”

  The guard looked up and frowned. Harry pointed toward the door. Now everybody at the front of the store was staring at him. “I saw an old friend,” Harry said to the guard, who looked away without responding and leaned back against the window.

  By the time Harry got to the sidewalk, Maggie was gone.

  All the way to Duane Street, Harry searched the sidewalks for her. When the cab stopped and Harry stood on the stamped metal walkway before the warehouse that housed William Tharpe’s loft, he thought—where I’m going there are a million girls like that.

  4

  Harry Beevers presented the chilled bottle of Dom Perignon to an astonished, gratified William Tharpe, and spent five or ten minutes in hypocritical raptures over the forthcoming number of Rilke Street. Then he took plain, greying Pat Caldwell Beevers, who was beginning more than ever to suggest an English sheepdog that had been mooning around him half his life, out to a TriBeCa restaurant of the sort he had learned from Tim Underhill to call piss-elegant. The walls were red lacquer. Discreet lamps with brass shades sat on each table. Portly waiters hovered. Harry thought of Maggie Lah, of her golden skin, of champagne bottles and other interesting things between her small but undoubtedly affecting breasts. All the while he elaborated various necessary fictions concerning his “mission.” Now and then, although Pat frequently smiled and seemed to enjoy her wine, her soup, her fish, he thought she knew that he was lying. Like Jimmy Lah, she asked him how Michael looked, how he thought he was doing, and Harry answered fine, fine. Her smiles seemed to Harry to be full of regret—whether for him, for herself, for Michael Poole, or the world at large, he could not tell. When the moment came when he asked for money, she said only, “How much?” Around two thousand. She reached into her bag, took out her checkbook and fountain pen, and without expression of any kind on her face wrote out a check for three thousand dollars.

  She passed the check across the table. Her face was now flushed in a mottled band from cheekbone to cheekbone, Harry thought unattractively so.

  “Of course I consider this strictly a loan,” he said. “You’re doing a lot of good with this money, Pat. I mean that.”

  “So the government wants you to track down this man to see if he might be a murderer?”

  “In a nutshell. Of course it’s a semi-private operation, which is how I’ll be able to do the book deals, the film deals, and so on. You can appreciate the need for strict confidentiality.”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, I know you could always read between the lines, but …” He let the sentence complete itself. “I’d be kidding you if I said there wasn’t quite a bit of potential danger involved in this.”

  “Oh, yes,” Pat said, nodding.

  “I shouldn’t even be thinking like this, but if I don’t come back, I think it would be fitting for me to be buried at Arlington.”

  She nodded again.

  Harry gave up and began looking around the room for the waiter.

  Pat startled him by saying, “There are still times when I’m sorry that you ever set foot in Vietnam.”

  “What’s the point,” he asked. “I’m me, I always was me, I’ve never been anything but me.”

  They parted outside the restaurant.

  After Harry had gone a short distance down the sidewalk, he turned around, smiling, knowing that Pat was watching him walk away. But she was moving straight ahead, her shoulders slumped, her overstuffed, lumpy bag swinging at her side.

  He went to his bank and let himself into the empty vestibule with his bank card. There he used the cash machine to deposit Pat’s check and one other he had obtained that day and to withdraw four hundred dollars in cash. He bought a copy of Screw at a corner newsstand and folded it under his arm so that no one would be able to identify it. Harry walked back through the cold to West 24th Street and the studio apartment he had found shortly after Pat told him, more forcefully than she had ever said anything in the entire course of their marriage, that she had to have a divorce.

  1

  It was funny, Conor thought, how ever since the reunion things from the old days kept coming back to him, as if Vietnam had been his real life and everything since was just the afterglow. It was hard for him to keep his mind on the present—back then kept breaking in, sometimes even physically. A few days before, an old man had innocently handed him a photograph taken by SP4 Cotton of Tim Underhill with his arm around one of his “flowers.”

  It was four o’clock in the afternoon, and Conor was lying in bed with his first serious hangover since the dedication of the Memorial. Everybody thought you got better at handling pressure as you got older, but in Conor’s experience everybody had it backwards.

  Three days earlier, Conor had been in the middle of the fifth week of a carpentry job that should have paid the rent at least until Poole and Beevers put their Singapore trip together. On Mount Avenue in Hampstead, only ten minutes from Conor’s tiny, almost comically underfurnished apartment in South Norwalk, a millionaire lawyer in his sixties named Charles (“Call me Charlie!”) Daisy had just remarried for the third time. For the sake of his new wife, Daisy was redoing the entire ground floor of his mansion—kitchen, sitting room, breakfast room, dining room, lounge, morning room, laundry room, and servants quarters. Daisy’s contractor, a white-bearded old-timer named Ben Roehm, had hired Conor when his usual crew proved too small. Conor had worked with Ben Roehm three or four times over the years. Like a lot of master carpenters who were geniuses at manipulating wood, Roehm could be moody and unpredictable, but he made carpentry more than just something you did to pay the rent. Working with Roehm was as close to pleasure as work could get, in Conor’s opinion.

  And the first day Conor was on the job, Charlie Daisy came home early from the office and walked into the sitting room where Conor and Ben Roehm were laying a new oak floor. He stood watching them for a long time. Conor got a little nervous. He figured maybe the client didn’t like the way he looked. To cut down the inevitable agony of kneeling on hardwood all day, Conor had tied thick rags around his knees. He’d knotted a speckled bandanna around his forehead to keep the sweat out of his eyes. (The bandanna made him think of Underhill, of flowers and flowing talk.) Conor thought he probably looked a little loose for Charlie Daisy. He was not completely surprised when Daisy took a step forward and coughed into his fist. “Ahem!” He and Roehm shot each other a quick glance. Clients, especially Mount Avenue-type clients, did nutty things right out of the blue
. “You, young man,” Daisy said. Conor looked up, blinking, painfully aware that he was down on all fours like a raggedy dog in front of this dapper little millionaire. “Am I right about something?” Daisy asked. “You were in Vietnam, right?”

  “Yes, sir,” Conor said, prepared for trouble.

  “Good man,” Daisy said. He reached down to shake Conor’s hand. “I knew I was right.”

  It turned out that his only son was another name on the wall—killed in Hue during the Tet offensive.

  For a couple of weeks it was probably the best job of Conor’s life. Almost every day he learned something new from Ben Roehm, little things that had as much to do with concentration and respect as with technique. A few days after shaking Conor’s hand, Charlie Daisy showed up at the end of the day carrying a grey suede box and a leather photo album. Conor and Roehm were framing a new partition in the kitchen, which looked like a bombsite—chopped-up floor, dangling wires, jutting pipes. Daisy picked his way toward them, saying, “Until I got married again, this was the only heart I had.” The box turned out to be a case for Daisy’s son’s medals. Laid out on lustrous satin were a Purple Heart, a Bronze Star, and a Silver Star. The album was full of pictures from Nam.

  Old Daisy chattered away, pointing at images of muddy M-48 tanks and shirtless teenagers with their arms around one another’s shoulders. Time travel ain’t just made up out of nothing, Conor thought. He was sorry that the perky old lawyer didn’t know enough to shut up and let the pictures talk for themselves.

  Because the pictures did talk. Hue was in I Corps, Conor’s Vietnam, and everything Conor looked at was familar.

  Here was the A Shau Valley—the mountains folding and folding into themselves, and a line of men climbing uphill in a single winding column, planting their feet in that same old mud. (Dengler: Yea, though I walk through the A Shau Valley, I shall fear no evil, because I’m the craziest son of a bitch in the valley.) Boy soldiers flashing the peace sign in a jungle clearing, one with a filthy strip of gauze around his naked upper arm. Conor saw Dengler’s burning, joyous face in place of the boy’s own.

  Conor looked at a haggard, whiskered face trying to grin over the barrel of an M-60 mounted in a big green Huey. Peters and Herb Recht had died in a chopper identical to this one, spilling plasma, ammunition belts, six other men, and themselves over a hillside twenty klicks from Camp Crandall.

  Conor found himself staring at the cylindrical rounds in the M-60’s belt.

  “I guess you recognize that copter,” Daisy said.

  Conor nodded.

  “Saw plenty of those in your day.”

  It was a question, but again he could do no more than nod.

  Two young soldiers so fresh they could not have been more than a week in the field sat on a grassy dike and tilted canteens to their mouths. “Those boys were killed alongside my son,” Daisy said. A wet wind ruffled their short hair. Lean oxen wandered in the blasted field behind them. Conor tasted plastic—that curdled deathlike taste of warm water in a plastic canteen.

  With the entranced, innocent voice of a man speaking more to himself than his listeners, Daisy supplied a commentary on men hauling 3.5-inch rocket shells to the roof of a building, a bunch of privates lollygagging in front of a wooden shack soon to become the headquarters of PFC Wilson Manly, soldiers smoking weed, soldiers asleep in a dusty wasteland that looked like the outskirts of LZ Sue, hatless grinning soldiers posing with impassive Vietnamese girls …

  “Here’s some guy, I don’t know who,” Daisy said. Once Conor saw the face, he was barely able to hear the lawyer’s voice. “Big so-and-so, wasn’t he? I can guess what he was up to with that little girl.”

  It was an honest mistake. His new wife had jumped-started Daisy’s gonads—why else was he coming home at four-thirty in the afternoon?

  Tim Underhill, bandanna around his neck, was the big soldier in the photograph. And the “girl” was one of his flowers—a young man so feminine he might have been an actual girl. Smiling at the photographer, they stood on a narrow street crammed with jeeps and rickshaws in what must have been Da Nang or Hue.

  “Son?” Daisy was saying. “You okay, son?”

  For a second Conor wondered if Daisy would give him Underhill’s picture.

  “You look a little white, son,” Daisy said.

  “Don’t worry,” Conor said. “I’m fine.”

  He merely scanned the rest of the photographs.

  “The truth is in the pudding,” he said. “You can’t forget this kind of shit.”

  Then Ben Roehm decided he needed another new man to do the taping in the kitchen and hired Victor Spitalny.

  Conor had been a few minutes late to work. When he came into the ruined kitchen a stranger with a long streaky-blond pony-tail was slouching against the skeletal framing of the new partition. The new man wore a raveled turtleneck under a plaid shirt. A worn toolbelt hung beneath his beerbelly. There was a new scab on the bridge of his nose, old scabs the color of overdone toast on the knuckles of his left hand. Red lines threaded the whites of his eyes. Conor’s memory released a bubble filled with the indelible odor of burning kerosene-soaked shit. Vietnam, a ground-pounder.

  Ben Roehm and the other carpenters and painters in the crew sat or sprawled on the floor, drinking morning coffee from their thermoses. “Conor, meet Tom Woyzak, your new taping partner,” Ben said. Woyzak stared at Conor’s outstretched hand for a few beats before grudgingly shaking it.

  Drink it down, Conor remembered, boo-koo good for your insides.

  All morning they silently taped sheetrock on opposite sides of the kitchen.

  After Mrs. Daisy had come and gone with a pot of fresh coffee at eleven, Woyzak growled, “See how she came on to me? Before this job is over I’ll be up in the bitch’s bedroom, nailing her to the floor.”

  “Sure, sure,” Conor said, laughing.

  Woyzak was instantly across the kitchen, leaving a steaming trail of coffee and a spinning cup on the floor. His teeth showed. He pushed his face up to Conor’s. “Don’t get in my way, faggot, or I’ll waste you.”

  “Back off,” Conor said. He shoved him away. Conor was set to move this lunatic off-center with a head fake, step into him and mash his adam’s apple with a left, but Woyzak dusted his shoulders as though Conor’s touch had dirtied him and backed away.

  At the end of the day Woyzak dropped his toolbelt in a corner of the kitchen and silently watched Conor pack his tools away for the night.

  “Ain’t you a neat little fucker,” he said.

  Conor slammed his toolbox shut. “Do you have many friends, Woyzak?”

  “Do you think these people are going to adopt you? These people are not going to adopt you.”

  “Forget it.” Conor stood up.

  “So you were over there too?” Woyzak asked in a voice that put as little curiosity as possible into the question.

  “Yeah.”

  “Clerk-typist?”

  In a rage, Conor shook his head and turned away.

  “What outfit were you in?”

  “Ninth Battalion, Twenty-Fourth Infantry.”

  Woyzak’s laugh sounded like wind blowing over loose gravel. Conor kept on walking until he was safely out of the house.

  He sat straddling his motorcycle for a long time, looking down at the dark grey stones of the drive, deliberately not thinking. The sky and the air were as dark as the gravel. Cold wind blew against his face. He could feel sharp individual stones digging into the soles of his boots.

  For a moment Conor was certain that he was going to fire up his Harley and go, just keep moving in a blur of speed and distance until he had flown without stopping across hundreds of miles. Speed and travel gave him a pleasant, light, kind of empty feeling. Conor saw highways rolling out before him, the neon signs in front of motels, hamburgers sizzling on the griddles of roadside diners.

  Perched on his bike in the cold air, he heard doors slamming inside the house. Ben Roehm’s big baritone rang out.

&n
bsp; He wished that Mike Poole would call him up and say, We’re on the way, babyface, pack your bags and meet us at the airport.

  Ben Roehm opened the door and fixed Conor with his eyes. He stepped outside and pulled on his heavy fleece-lined denim coat. “See you tomorrow?”

  “I got nowhere else to go,” Conor said.

  Ben Roehm nodded. Conor kicked his Harley into noisy life and rode off as the rest of the crew came through the door.

  For three or four days Woyzak and Conor ignored each other. When Charlie Daisy finally scented another veteran and appeared with his box of medals and his photo album, Conor put down his tools and wandered out. He couldn’t bear to hang around while Thomas Woyzak looked at Underhill’s picture.

  The night before what turned out to be his last day, Conor woke up at four from a nightmare about M.O. Dengler and Tim Underhill. At five he got out of bed. He made a pot of coffee and drank nearly all of it before he left for work. Pieces of the dream clung to Conor all morning.

  He is cowering in a bunker with Dengler, and they are enduring a firefight. Underhill must be in a dark portion of the same bunker or in another right beside it, for his rich voice, sounding a great deal like Ben Roehm’s, carries over most of the noise.

  There had been no bunkers in Dragon Valley.

  The lieutenant’s corpse sits upright against the far side of the bunker, its legs splayed out. Blood from a neat slash in the lieutenant’s throat has sheeted down over his trunk, staining his chest solidly red.

  “Dengler!” Conor says in his dream. “Dengler, look at the lieutenant! That asshole got us into this mess and now he’s dead!”

  Another great light burst in the sky, and Conor sees a Koko card protruding from Lieutenant Beevers’ mouth.

  Conor touches Dengler’s shoulder and Dengler’s body rolls over onto his legs and Conor sees Dengler’s mutilated face and the Koko card in his gaping mouth. He screams in both the dream and real life and wakes up.

  Conor got to work early and waited outside for the others. A few minutes later Ben Roehm pulled up in his Blazer with the two other members of the crew who lived up in his part of the state. They were men with babies and rent to pay, but too young to have been in Vietnam. As he watched them get out of the cab, Conor realized that he felt surprisingly paternal toward these sturdy young carpenters—they didn’t have enough experience to know the difference between Ben Roehm and most of the other contractors around.