Koko

by Peter Straub

  “He didn’t have parents.” She gleamed at them, self-satisfaction personified. “Not the way real people do, not like Karl and me. Manny was born out of wedlock. His mother, Rosita, sold her body. One of those women. She delivered the baby in Mount Sinai Hospital and abandoned him there, just walked out as fancy as you please, and the baby had a viral infection—he nearly died. Many did, but did he? My husband and I prayed for him, and he did not die. Rosita Orosco died a few weeks later. Beaten to death. Do you think the boy’s father killed her? Manny was Spanish only on his mother’s side, that’s what Karl and I always thought. So you see what I mean. He had neither mother nor father.”

  “Was Manny’s father one of his mother’s customers?” Underhill asked.

  “We did not think about it.”

  “But you said that you did not think the father was Spanish … Latin American.”

  “Well.” Helga Dengler shifted on the stool, and her eyes changed weather. “He had a good side to balance the bad.”

  “How did you come to adopt him?”

  “Karl heard about the poor baby.”

  “How did he hear? Had you gone to adoption agencies?”

  “Of course not. I think the woman came to him. Rosita Orosco. My husband’s church work brought many low, unhappy people to us, begging for their souls to be saved.”

  “Did you see Rosita Orosco at the church services?”

  Now she planted both feet on the floor and stared at him. She seemed to be breathing through her skin. Nobody spoke for an excruciating time.

  “I didn’t mean to offend you, Mrs. Dengler,” Underhill finally said.

  “We had white people at our services,” she said in a low, slow, even voice. “Sometimes we had Catholics. But they were always good people. Polishers. They can be as good as anyone else.”

  “I see,” Underhill said. “You never saw Manny’s mother at your services.”

  “Manny did not have a mother,” she said in the same slow, evenly paced voice. “He had no mother, no father.”

  Underhill asked if the police had ever arrested the person who beat Rosita Orosco to death.

  She shook her head very slowly, like a child vowing never to tell a secret. “Nobody cared who did that. That woman being what she was and all. Whosoever did it could come to the Lord. He is the eternal court of justice.”

  With hallucinatory clarity, Poole remembered the torture chamber in the Tiger Balm Gardens, the distorted half-human shapes kneeling before an imperious judge.

  “And so they never found him.”

  “I don’t recall that they did.”

  “Your husband had no interest in the matter?”

  “Of course not,” she said. “We had already done all we could.”

  She had closed her eyes, and Poole changed the direction of the questions. “When did your husband die, Mrs. Dengler?”

  Her eyes opened and flashed at him. “My husband died in the year 1960.”

  “And you closed the butcher shop and the church in that year?”

  The weird intimidating light had gone on in her face again. “A little bit before that. Manny was too young to be a butcher.”

  Couldn’t you see him? Poole wanted to ask. Couldn’t you see what a gift he was to you, no matter where he came from?

  “Manny didn’t have friends,” she said, speaking almost as if she had heard Poole’s thoughts. Some emotion swelling in her voice caught in Poole’s inner ear, and it was not until her next sentence that he identified it as pride. “He had too much to do, he followed Karl that way. We kept the boy busy, you must keep your children at their tasks. Yes. At their tasks. For that is how they will learn. When Karl was a boy, he had no friends. I kept Manny away from other boys and raised him in the way we knew was right. And when he was bad we did what Scripture says to do.” She raised her head and looked straight at Maggie. “We had to thrash his mother out of him. Well. Yes. We could have changed his name, you know. We could have given him a good German name. But he had to know he was half Manuel Orosco, even if the other half could become Dengler. And Manuel Orosco had to be tamed and put in chains. No matter what anybody said. You do this out of love and you do it because you have to. Let me show you how it worked. Look at this, now.”

  She flipped through pages of photographs, staring down at them with a rapt, abstracted face. Poole wished he could see all the photographs in that book. From where he sat, he thought he caught glimpses of bonfires and big flags, but he saw only blurred fragments of images.

  “Yes,” she said. “There. You see this, you know. A boy doing a man’s job.”

  She held up a newspaper clipping preserved behind the transparent sheet the way her furniture was preserved beneath the plastic covers.

  Milwaukee Journal, September 20, 1958 was written in ink at the top of the page. Beneath the photograph was the caption: BUTCHER’S BOY: Little eight-year-old Manny Dengler helping out in Dad’s Muffin Street shop. Dresses deer all by himself! This is believed to be a record.

  And there, in between, occupying half a page in the old album, was the photograph of a small black-haired boy facing the camera in a bloody apron so much too big for him that it laps around him twice and encases him like a sausage skin. In his raised right hand, attached to his skinny angular eight-year-old’s arm, is a massive cleaver. The photographer has told him to hold up the cleaver, for the instrument is too large for both his hand and the job spread out neatly before him. It is the headless body of a deer, stripped of its skin and cut neatly into sections, shoulders, the long graceful ribcage, the curved flanks, the wide wet haunches like a woman’s. The little boy’s face is Dengler’s, and it wears a piercing expression which mingles sweetness and doubt.

  “He could be good,” his mother said. “Here is the proof. Youngest boy in the State of Wisconsin to dress a deer all by himself.” Her face flickered for a moment, and Poole wondered if she were experiencing or even just remembering grief. He felt scorched: as if he had been swallowing fire.

  “If they let him stay at home instead of taking him away to be with you and fight a war with—” A blast of ice at Maggie. “If not for that, he could be working in the shop right now, and I could have the old age I earned. Instead of this. This pauper’s existence. The government stole him. Didn’t they know why we got him in the first place?”

  Now they were all included in her scorn. Her eyes snapped, and the color came up into her face and faded out again, like an optical illusion. “After what they said,” she said, almost to herself. “That’s the beauty part. After what they said, they were the ones who killed him.”

  “What did they say?” Poole asked.

  She froze him now with a blast from her eyes.

  Poole stood up and learned that his knees were shaking. The fire he had swallowed still burned all the way down his throat.

  Before he could speak, Underhill asked if they could see the boy’s room.

  The old woman rose. “They stole him,” she said, still glaring at Maggie. “Everyone lied about us.”

  “The army lied when Manny was drafted?” Poole asked.

  Her gaze moved to him, filled with scorn and illumination. “It wasn’t just the army,” she said.

  “Manny’s room?” Underhill asked again into the strange cold frost the woman created about her.

  “Of course,” she said, actually smiling down. “You’ll see. None of the others did. Come this way.”

  She turned around and stumped out of the room. Poole imagined spiders fleeing back up into the corners of their webs, rats scurrying into their holes, as her footsteps thumped toward them.

  “We go upstairs, so,” she said, and led them out into the hall and toward the staircase. The odor of must and wood rot was much stronger in the hallway. Every stair creaked, and brown irregular rust stains spread out from the heads of the nails that fastened the linoleum to the treads.

  “He had his own room, he had everything the best,” she said. “Down the hall from us. We could h
ave put him in the basement, and we could have put him in the back of the butcher shop. But the child’s place is near his parents. This is one thing I know: the child’s place is near his parents. You see. The apple was near the tree. Karl could see the boy at any time. Every healthy child must be punished as well as praised.”

  The roofline narrowed the upper corridor to a walkway where Poole and Underhill had to bend their necks. At the end of the narrow corridor a single window, grey with dust and watermarks, gave a view of telephone lines capped with runners of snow. Mrs. Dengler opened the second of the two wooden doors. “This was Manny’s,” she said, and stood by the door like a museum guide as they entered.

  It was like walking into a closet. The room was perhaps eight feet by ten feet, much darker than the rest of the house. Poole reached out for the switch and flipped it, but no light came on. Then he saw the cord and empty socket dangling from the ceiling. The window had been boarded up with two-by-fours, and looked like a rectangular wooden box. For a mad second Poole thought that Dengler’s mother was going to slam the door and lock the three of them inside the windowless little chamber—then they would be truly inside Dengler’s childhood. But Helga Dengler was standing beside the open door, looking down with pursed lips, indifferent to what they saw or what they thought.

  The room could have changed only very little since Dengler had left it. There was a narrow bed covered with an army surplus blanket. A child’s desk stood against the wall, a child’s bookshelf beside it with a few volumes leaning on its shelves. Poole bent over the books and grunted with surprise. Red-bound copies of Babar and Babar the King, identical to the ones in the trunk of his car, stood on the top shelf. Maggie came up to him and said “Oh!” when she saw the books.

  “We didn’t stop the boy from reading, don’t think we did,” said Mrs. Dengler.

  The shelves provided a graph of his reading—from Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Babar to Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. A toy car sat beside these books, two of its wheels gone and most of its paint worn off with handling. Books on fossils, birds, and snakes. A small number of religious tracts, and a pocket-sized Bible.

  “He spent all day up here, when we let him,” said the old woman. “Lazy, he was. Or would have been, if we had let him be that way.”

  The little room seemed unbearably claustrophobic to Poole. He wished he could put his arms around the little boy who had escaped into this windowless chamber and tell him that he was not bad, not lazy, not damned.

  “My son loved Babar too,” he said.

  “No substitute for Scripture,” she said. “As you can plainly tell by where these came from.” In response to Poole’s look, she said, “His mother. She bought those elephant books. Stole them, more likely. As if a baby could ever read such a big book. Had them right with her, right there in the hospital, and she left them behind with the baby when she took off. Throw them out, I said, they’re garbage garbage garbage, just like where they came from, but Karl said no, let the boy have something of his natural mother—”unnatural mother, “I said, and the sour will soon spoil the sweet, but Karl wanted it and so it was. Books like those vanished from the church’s rummage box, but they were different copies—Karl knew.”

  Poole wondered if she really took him in at all, or if she saw purple marbles ready to be cracked in the pan and glued into endless repetitions of the same pattern. Then he saw that she would not enter the room. She wanted to come in and pull them out, but her legs would not carry her inside, her feet would not move across the threshold.

  “… looked and looked at those books, the boy did. Won’t find anything in there, I told him. That’s foolishness. Elephants can’t help you, I said, that’s trash, and trash ends up in the gutter, I told him. And he knew what I was talking about. Yes. He knew.”

  “I think we could leave now,” Underhill said. Maggie muttered something Poole did not catch—he realized that he had just been staring at Helga Dengler, who was facing him but looking at a scene visible only to her.

  “He was just a little cuckoo we took in,” she said. “We brought him into our nest, we were godly people, we gave the boy what we had, his own room, plenty of food, everything, and he laid it to waste.” She stepped back to let the three of them come out of her son’s room and then stood looking at them. “I was not surprised by what happened to Manny,” she said at what seemed the last possible moment. “He died in the gutter too, didn’t he, just like his mother? Karl was always too good.”

  They made their way down the stairs.

  “You’ll be going now,” she said, and shuffled past them toward the door.

  Frigid air rolled down the hallway as they buttoned up their coats. When she smiled, her white cheeks shifted like floured slabs. “I wish we could talk more, but I have to get back to my work. Take care now, get all buttoned up nice.”

  They stepped outside into the cold clean air.

  “Bye-bye,” she called softly from the door as they went down the porch steps. “Bye-bye now. Yes. Bye-bye.”

  When they got back into the car, Maggie said she felt sick, and wanted to go back to the Pforzheimer to lie down while the other two met Victor Spitalny’s friend at The Polka Dot Lounge. “I need time to recover.” Poole knew what she meant.

  “So that was how Dengler grew up,” Underhill said as they drove north on the frozen streets.

  “His parents bought him,” Maggie said. “He was supposed to be their slave. That poor little boy and his Babar books.”

  “What was all that stuff about ‘them’? About lying? She never explained it.”

  “I have a feeling I’m going to regret this,” Underhill said, “but after we drop Maggie off at the hotel, I’d like you to take me to the main branch of the Milwaukee library. It’s probably downtown somewhere, fairly close to our hotel. I want to look up some things in the Milwaukee papers. There were a lot of things that woman never explained.”

  Fifteen minutes early for his meeting, Poole pulled into the crowded parking lot beside The Polka Dot Lounge. It was a long, low gabled building that looked as if it should have been covered with ivy and placed in a German forest instead of on this steep gritty street leading down into the darkness of the Valley. Overhead, the long bridge the three of them had crossed on their way to the Spitalny house resounded with traffic. Oval lead-colored clouds that looked as solid as battleships hung motionless in the air further down, and bright red flames wavered at the tops of columns. Neon beer signs glowed in the tavern’s small side windows.

  Poole pushed open the door and entered a long, hazy barroom. Cigarette smoke and loud rock music eddied about him. Men in workshirts and caps already stood two deep at the bar. A blonde waitress in tight jeans and a down vest carried pitchers of beer and bowls of popcorn through the tables on a platter. Booths, most of them empty, stood along the walls. The floor was covered with sawdust, popcorn, peanut shells. The Polka Dot was a workingman’s bar, not a puritanical neighborhood tavern with too many lights and lachrymose music. Most of the men at the bar Poole’s age would have been in Vietnam—no college deferments here. Poole felt more at home in his first few minutes inside the Polka Dot than at any other time during his visit to the Midwest.

  He managed to squeeze into an empty place at the far end of the bar. “Pforzheimer’s,” he said. “I’m supposed to meet Mack Simroe here. Has he come in yet?”

  “Still a little early for Mack,” the bartender said. “Take a booth, I’ll tell him you’re here.”

  Poole took a booth and sat facing the door. After fifteen minutes a huge bearded man in a ripped down jacket and a jungle hat came through the door. The man began to scan the booths, and Poole knew instantly that this was Mack Simroe. The giant’s eyes found Poole, and the giant gave him a wide toothy smile from the center of his beard. Poole stood up. The big man striding toward him was congenial and puzzled and open for anything, all of which was visible in his face. Simroe engulfed his hand and said, “I guess you’re
Dr. Poole, Let’s get a pitcher and make Jenny’s life a little easier, what do you say, this stuff is better on draft anyway.…”

  And then they were facing each other in the booth with a pitcher of beer and a bowl of popcorn between them. After being in the Dengler house, Michael felt peculiarly sensitive to odors, and from Mack Simroe came what must have been the undiluted breath of the Valley: a smell of machine oil and metal shavings. It would be the smell inside one of those leaden clouds of frozen smoke. Simroe was a fitter at the Dux Company, which manufactured ball bearings and engine parts, and he usually stopped in here at the end of his day.

  “You knocked the pins out from under me,” Simroe said, “asking about Vic Spitalny and all that. Sorta brought back a lot of stuff.”

  “I hope you don’t mind talking a little bit more about it.”

  “Hey, I’d be here anyhow. Who else you been talking to?”

  “His parents.”

  “They heard from him?”

  Poole shook his head.

  “George went off the rails when Vic got in all that trouble. Started drinking too much, and on the job too, way I heard it. Got in a lot of fights. Glax put him on leave for a month, I guess he discovered George Wallace in all his greatness around then. He started doing some work for Wallace and that got him back on the track. George still won’t hear a word against Wallace. Who else you talk to? Debbie Maczik? What’s her name now—Tusa?”

  “I did.”

  “Nice kid. Always liked Debbie.”

  “Did you like Victor, too?” Poole asked.

  Simroe leaned forward, and Poole was acutely aware of bulging forearms and his huge head. “You know, I can’t help wondering what all this is about. I don’t mind talking to you, buddy, not at all, but first I’d just kinda like to know the background. You were in the same unit as Vic?”

  “All the way,” Poole said.

  “Dragon Valley? Ia Thuc?”

  “Every step.”

  “And you’re a civilian these days?”