Koko

by Peter Straub

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Just shut up and I’ll take you where you wanna go. Okay with you?”

  “Okay with me,” Poole said. “Sure. You bet.”

  Maggie put her hands over her mouth. Her shoulders were shaking.

  “Driver, is there a bar called The House of Correction in this town?” Underhill asked.

  “I hearda that one,” the driver said.

  The cab hit a patch of ice at the end of the bridge, skidded nearly halfway around, then straightened out again. The smell of chocolate momentarily filled the cab.

  “What’s that from?” Underhill asked. “The smell.”

  “Chocolate factory.”

  Now they drove endlessly on streets both broad and narrow bordered by two-story houses with tiny porches. Every block had its own bar named something like Pete ‘N’ Bill’s and covered with the same peeling brickface or asphalt siding as the little houses. Some blocks had two bars, one on each corner. Tall chain fences blocked off vacant lots heaped with snow that looked blue and cancerous beneath the streetlamps. Every now and then a beer sign burned in the window of what otherwise looked like a private house. On the brightly lighted corner before SAM ‘N’ ANNIE’S GOOD TIMES LOUNGE, a fat man in a wolfskin parka was braced before a big black dog. The cab stopped at the traffic light. The man struck the dog with his left hand, slapping it hard enough to rock it to its side. Then he struck it with his right hand. Poole could see the man grinning, showing his teeth inside the parka. He hit the dog again, and the animal backed up, crinkling its lip away from its long teeth. Again the man smashed his hand against the dog’s head. This time the dog slipped, and skittered on the ice pavement before it got its footing again. The dog lowered its shoulders and inched backward. Poole was staring at the man and the dog—the man owned the dog, this was how he played with it. The light changed, and the cab moved ahead through the empty intersection just as the dog charged. Both Poole and Underhill craned their necks to look through the rear window. All they could see was the man’s pale furry back, broad as a tractor, jerking from side to side as he and the dog engaged.

  Ten minutes later the cab pulled up before one of the two-story frame houses. The numbers 6 8 3 5 had been nailed to the top of the porch. Poole opened the door and began paying the driver. The air instantly burned his cheeks, his forehead, his nose. His fingers had turned clumsy in the cold. “Were you in Vietnam?” he asked. “I saw the Airborne insignia on your hands.”

  The driver shook his head. “I’m only twenty years old, pop.”

  They hurried up the icy concrete walk. The steps sagged, and the porch tilted to the right. Over the original surface of the house, green pebbly asphalt paper had been applied, and flaps had begun to peel away from the door and windows. Poole pushed the bell. The smell of chocolate surprised him again.

  “Just a sweet and sour kind of town,” Underhill said.

  “Sweet ‘n’ sour,” Maggie said.

  The door opened, and a short stocky man with thinning black hair plastered straight back against his skull frowned through the storm door. He was wearing khaki trousers and a clean, starched khaki work shirt with double front pockets. His hard little eyes scanned the two men and stopped moving when they reached Maggie. He had not expected anything like her, and he did not really recover until she smiled at him. He gave Poole a dark look, then broke down and cracked the storm door open a few inches.

  “You the people who called?”

  “Mr. Spitalny?” Poole asked. “May we come in?”

  George Spitalny pushed open the storm door and stood there propping it open and scowling until the three visitors had edged around him into the entry. Poole smelled sausage and boiled cabbage. “Go on,” Spitalny’s father said, “I gotta close the door.” Everybody jostled together to allow it to swing closed. “In there.”

  Poole followed Maggie and Underhill through a doorway into a living room where an anxious-looking woman in a flowered housedress stood clutching her hands before a sofa covered in plastic. Her face froze when she saw Maggie, and her eyes darted toward her husband. George Spitalny stayed in the entrance, unwilling to help. It was clear that both of them had been sitting on the sofa, staring out the window, waiting for a car to pull up, and now that the company had come neither one of them knew what to do.

  Maggie stepped forward and held out her hand to Mrs. Spitalny. She introduced the two men, who also stepped forward.

  Mr. Spitalny hurriedly shook the hands of the men, and said, “Well, I guess you better take a pew.” He moved to a large green recliner and hitched up his trouser legs before he sat down. Maggie, still smiling for all she was worth, sat down next to Mrs. Spitalny.

  “Well,” George Spitalny said.

  “You have a beautiful home, Mrs. Spitalny,” said Maggie.

  “It suits us. What did you say your name was?”

  “Maggie Lah.”

  Margaret Spitalny tentatively held out her hand toward Maggie, then realized that she had already shaken her hand, and snatched her hand back.

  “Still snowing, is it?” she asked.

  Her husband looked out the window. “Stopped.”

  “Oh. My.”

  “Couple hours back.”

  Poole realized that he was looking at a photograph of Governor George Wallace, beaming from his wheelchair in the midst of a crowd. Porcelain deer, gnomes, and dairy maids stood on a round table beside him. The floor had been covered with green linoleum. Everything was very clean.

  George Spitalny took another shuttered look at Maggie, then frowned down at his shoes on the bright linoleum.

  These people had no idea of how to act when other people were in their house, Poole realized. If it had not been for Maggie, they would all still be standing inside the door.

  “So you people knew Victor,” George Spitalny said. He looked at Poole, then gave another doubtful glance at Maggie.

  “Dr. Poole and I served with him,” Underhill said.

  “Doctor, are you?”

  “Pediatrician.”

  “Umm.” George pursed his lips. “Well. I still don’t know what you people expect to find. I think all this is a big waste of your time. We got nothing to say on the subject of Victor.”

  “Oh, George.”

  “Maybe you got something to say. I don’t know what.”

  “Maybe these men would like a beer, George?”

  “Got some Hamm’s,” George said.

  “Please,” they said, and George walked through the door, relieved to have something to do.

  “I hope you don’t think we’re wasting our time, Mrs. Spitalny,” Underhill said, leaning forward and smiling at her. In his bulky sweater and blue jeans, Underhill looked utterly at ease, and for as long as she could focus on him, Mrs. Spitalny relaxed.

  “I don’t know why George said that. He’s still upset about Vic, I guess. He’s proud, you know—very proud.”

  She closed her mouth and threw her eyes out of focus again as her husband returned to the room carrying three bottles of beer with water glasses upended on their necks. He held them out toward Michael, who gingerly took the first from his fingers. The second beer went to Underhill, and he kept the third for himself. Maggie gave Mrs. Spitalny another bright smile.

  George Spitalny sat down and poured his beer. “Bet you don’t get this where you come from, huh? Most people around here won’t drink nothing but the local brews. It’s all Pforzheimer’s with most of your people here. They don’t know what they’re missing. And I’ve tried your New York beer. Swill, I thought. Plain swill.”

  “George.”

  “Wait till they try this. It’s the water that makes the difference. I always say that, it’s the water.”

  “Sure it’s the water,” Underhill said. “You bet it’s the water.”

  “What else could it be?”

  “Did Vic have friends?” Margaret Spitalny broke in, speaking directly to Tim Underhill. “Did you people like him?”

&nbs
p; “Well, sure he had friends,” Underhill said. “He was very close to Tony Ortega. And a lot of other people. Isn’t that true, Mike?”

  “Sure,” said Poole, trying not to see Victor Spitalny attempting to saw the ear off Anthony Ortega’s corpse with his K-bar. “We were his friends. We went out on a lot of missions with Victor.”

  “Victor saved their lives,” Maggie said with a smile so forced that Poole could feel its strain. “Why don’t you tell the Spitalnys about that?” Poole and Underhill looked at each other for a moment, and Maggie chimed in, “In Dragon Valley. Well, maybe he didn’t save your lives exactly, but he kept everybody calm and he followed the medic around.…”

  “Oh,” Poole said. Both George and Margaret Spitalny were staring at Poole, and with a silent apology to Dengler’s ghost, he began, “Well, on Lieutenant Beevers’ first day in the field, he got lost and led us into an ambush …”

  When he had finished, Margaret Spitalny said, “Vic never told us anything like that.”

  “Vic never bragged about himself,” Underhill said.

  “Anything else like that ever happen?” George asked.

  “Did he ever tell you about the time he carried a wounded soldier named Hannapin on his back about three or four miles?”

  Both Spitalnys shook their heads, absolutely riveted, and Poole told another Dengler story.

  “Well, maybe the service made a man of him after all,” his father said, looking sideways at George Wallace in his wheelchair. “I believe I’ll have another beer.” He stood up and left the room again.

  “God bless you, boys,” said Margaret Spitalny. “And you too, miss. Do you all work for the army?”

  “No, we don’t,” said Poole. “Mrs. Spitalny, do you have any letters or postcards, or anything at all from Victor? Any photographs of him?”

  “After—you know, after we heard, George took everything of Vic’s from the service and burned it. Every little scrap.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “I have all the pictures from when he was little and some from high school.”

  “Has he been in touch with you at all since he left the army?”

  “Of course not,” she said. “Vic’s dead.”

  Mr. Spitalny came through the door with more beer bottles, this time with one for Maggie. “I forgot a glass,” he told her. “Can you drink it out of the bottle?”

  “No, George, she’s a lady, she needs a glass,” his wife said, and, after distributing the other bottles of Hamm’s, he left the room again. “George won’t admit it, but I know. Vic’s been dead a long time.”

  “It seemed to us that he might be alive,” Michael said. “We—”

  George Spitalny returned with a glass and gave it to Maggie with a long look. “Where’d a girl like you pick up such good English?”

  “New York City.”

  Blink.

  “I came here when I was six.”

  “Born over there in Vietnam, were you?”

  “I was born in Formosa.”

  Blink.

  “I am Chinese.” Maggie was smiling so broadly Poole thought her cheek muscles must hurt.

  “But you knew Victor.”

  “I only heard about him.”

  “Oh.” He was deterred for only a moment. “Think you’re ready for one of our good old Milwaukee suppers?”

  “Not yet, George,” said his wife.

  “You ever hear of the Glax Corporation, honey? One of the biggest outfits in the States. You ever hear about it over in China?”

  Maggie’s expression of rapt interest did not waver.

  “Circuit breakers. Big plant in the Valley. You probably saw it on the way over here. If you’re in town long enough, you oughta pay a visit, I’ll show you around, introduce you to everybody. How about that?”

  “Very exciting,” Maggie said.

  “Lots of good places around there, too—lots of surprises in this little old town.”

  Poole watched George Spitalny leaning forward in his reclining chair, eating up Maggie Lah with his eyes. He had forgotten his wife and the two men. He felt great—he had heard unexpectedly good news about his son, he had a beer in one hand, and a girl who looked like Sex Incarnate was sitting on his living room couch. He was an awful man. He had burned Victor’s effects because of wounded narcissism. Poole felt an unexpected stab of pity for Victor Spitalny, growing up under the thumb of this vain, arrogant, inadequate man.

  “What was Victor like as a boy?” he asked.

  George Spitalny turned his face heavily, almost warningly toward Poole. Don’t mess with my action, sonny. Before he answered, he chugged down his beer and nearly winked at Maggie. “He didn’t amount to much, that’s the sad truth. Vic was kind of an unhappy kid. Cried a lot, didn’t he?”

  A look of pure cold indifference for his wife.

  “Oh, Vic cried. All babies cry.”

  “He was a big disappointment. Never had friends until he got to high school. Never made his grades. He wasn’t even any good at sports, like I thought he was gonna be. Here, I got something to show you.” He gave Maggie a tight, almost shy smile and stood up again and left the room. They could hear him rapidly climbing the stairs.

  “You said that Vic might be alive?” Margaret Spitalny asked Poole.

  “We think it might be a possibility.”

  “There’s no record of his death,” Underhill said in a gentle voice. “He just disappeared. And he was in Thailand, so he could have just stayed there—or gone any of a dozen different places. He could have bought a new identity. You really haven’t had even a postcard from him since his disappearance?”

  Heavy footsteps came thumping back down the stairs, and Margaret Spitalny shook her head and glanced at the door. Her hands had begun to tremble. “I don’t think—” She stopped speaking when her husband burst into the room, this time carrying a photograph in an old silver frame.

  “Take a look at that, Maggie.” He thrust it at her. Margaret looked sidelong at Poole, then looked down into her lap.

  “Better see to the supper.” She stood up and without looking at him moved around her husband, who was still grinning down at Maggie and breathing a little hard from his exertions on the stairs.

  Poole moved closer to Maggie to look at the photograph. It was an old studio picture of a young man in a baseball uniform, posing with a bat in his hands. At eighteen or nineteen, George Spitalny had looked much like the son he would father—the same narrow head and widow’s peak. He was more muscular than Victor had been, however, sturdier, more forceful: the face was that of a young man as unpleasant as Victor, but in a completely different way.

  “Not bad, huh? That was me, 1938. What do you think of that?”

  Maggie made no comment, and Spitalny took her silence as an inability to find adequate words. “I don’t think I look too different now, even though it’s about fifty years later. Next year I hit my retirement, and I’m still in damn good shape.” He angled the photograph toward Michael for a moment, then toward Underhill before turning it back to Maggie. “That’s the way a young man ought to look. Right? Well, when I looked at my kid—I mean the day Vic was born, when they brought him out to me so I could see him, I looked down at this little baby, and I got this tremendous shock. Here I was thinking I would just love this kid, love him to death. Isn’t that supposed to be automatic? I thought that was supposed to be automatic. But I couldn’t feel anything, really. I couldn’t get over how goddamned ugly the kid was. Right away, I saw he was never gonna measure up to me. And you might call that psychic, or whatever, but I was right—he never did. Never. Not once. When he had that girlfriend in high school, that Debbie Maczik, I couldn’t figure out how he could hold onto a girl cute like that. Tell you the truth, I used to think she used to come around here to see me, more than she liked to see him.”

  “Ready,” Margaret called from somewhere in the rear of the house.

  George Spitalny let Maggie feast a while longer on the photograph, then set it down on top of the televi
sion. “You guys go on back to the kitchen and sit down. I gotta go to the little boy’s room.”

  4

  “And what happened when we finally saw the pictures?” Tim asked, smiling at Maggie in the backseat of the cab during their ride back to the hotel.

  Michael too had been waiting to ask this question.

  After their dinner—“Put some of the ketchup on your kielbasa, Maggie, it’s what we have here instead of soy sauce”—Mrs. Spitalny had finally gone upstairs and brought back from wherever they had been cached her pictures of Victor. Both Spitalnys had resisted showing these photographs, but when they had arrived George had taken charge, declaring some of them useless, others ridiculous, a few too ugly to be shown. In the end, they had been shown three photographs: one of a confused-looking boy of eight or nine on a bicycle, one of a teenage Victor leaning against the hood of an old black Dodge, and the third the standard end-of-basic-training yearbook photograph.

  None of these precisely had resembled the Victor Spitalny remembered by Poole and Underhill. It was something of a shock that Victor Spitalny had ever looked as innocent as the boy in the warrior photograph. Leaning against the car with his arms crossed over his T-shirt, he looked surly but proud, for once in control of himself. In his pose was a long history of Elvis-worship. Oddly, it was the picture of the little boy that had most evoked the Victor Spitalny of Vietnam.

  “Could you recognize him?” Michael asked.

  Maggie nodded, but very slowly. “It had to be him. It was very dark in the loft, and the face in my memory has been getting vaguer and vaguer—but I’m pretty sure it was him. Also, the man I saw was crazy, and the boy in the pictures didn’t look crazy. But if I were a boy and had that man for a father, I’d be crazy too. He thought the worst thing about his son’s being a deserter was the injury it gave to his own ego.”

  “You have those telephone numbers?” Underhill asked.

  She nodded again. George and Margaret Spitalny had looked up the numbers of Bill Hopper and Mack Simroe, both of them now married, living in their old neighborhood and working in the Valley, and of Deborah Maczik Tusa. Tomorrow they would rent a car to go back to the South Side. Poole remembered the unfocused, inward-gazing expression of the unattractive little boy on his bicycle. Desperate, someone had said (probably Maggie): that was why the photo of the eight-year-old Victor Spitalny looked more like the man they had known than the more adult photographs they had been shown. Only in the face of the boy on the bicycle, with his protruding ears and big adult front teeth in his child’s face, could you see his desperation.