Koko brt-1

by Peter Straub

  They passed beneath the second gate. Just past a huge allegorical figure representing Thailand was a tableau of a peasant woman sprawled on the representation of a field, her basket lost behind her, her arms outstretched in a plea for help. A child raced toward her, a peasant in shorts and a pagoda hat extended an arm to threaten or aid. (The handout booklet explained that he is offering her a bottle of Tiger Balm.) Two oxen locked horns in the background.

  Sweat poured down Poole’s face. He remembered a muddy field slanting down a Vietnamese hillside and Spitalny raising his rifle to sight on a woman scampering toward a circle of hootches beyond which lean oxen grazed. Her bright blue pajamas shone vividly against the brown field. Mosquitos. The heavy pails of water suspended on a wooden yoke over the woman’s shoulders hampered her movements: Poole remembered the shock of recognizing that the pails of water were as important to her as her life—she would not throw the yoke off her shoulders. Spitalny’s rifle cracked, and the woman’s feet lifted, and for a moment she sped along parallel to the ground without touching it. Soon she collapsed in a blue puddle beside the long curved yoke. The pails clattered downhill. Spitalny fired again. The oxen bolted away from the village, running so close together their flanks touched. The woman’s body jerked forward as if it had been pushed by an invisible force, and then began to roll loosely downhill. Her forearms flipped up, out, up like spokes on a broken flywheel.

  Poole turned to Harry Beevers, who had glanced at the statues on top of the brain-wall and was now staring at two pretty Chinese girls giggling together near the pagoda gate. “Do you remember Spitalny shooting that girl outside Ia Thuc? The one in blue pajamas?”

  Beevers glanced at him, blinked, then looked back at the sculptures of the farmer and his wife. He nodded and smiled. “Sure. But that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.”

  “No,” Conor said, “that was another wench, and besides, the country’s dead.”

  “She was obviously VC,” Beevers said. He glanced again at the Chinese girls as if they too were Viet Cong who ought to be executed. “She was there, therefore she was VC.”

  The two girls were now walking past Beevers as if on tiptoe. They were slender girls with shoulder-length black hair and dresses of the sort, Poole thought, that used to be called frocks. Were there still frocks? He glanced up the hill and saw another pack of schoolgirls in uniform—dark blazers and flat hats.

  “This whole place is back in the fifties,” Beevers said. “I don’t mean the gardens, I mean Singapore. It’s about 1954 over here. You get arrested for jaywalking, littering, and spitting on the street. You ever go to one of those towns out West where they reenact gunfights? Where the falls are all rehearsed and the guns have no bullets and nobody gets hurt?”

  “Aw, come on,” Conor said.

  “I have a feeling that’s Boogey Street,” Beevers said.

  “Let’s find the torture chamber,” Poole said, and Conor laughed out loud.

  On the crown of the hill, with a view down across the terraces and ornaments of the garden, stood a giant brain of gnarled, twisted blue plaster. A white sign announced in red letters: TORTURE CHAMBER HERE. “Hey, this doesn’t look so bad,” Beevers said. “I ought to get pictures of this.” He took his Instamatic out of his pocket and checked the number on the back. Then he went up the low concrete steps and through the entrance. Winking at Poole, Conor followed.

  The cool, shady interior of the plaster grotto had been divided in half by a walkway from which one looked down through wire fences at a sequence of busy scenes. When Poole stepped inside, his friends were already well along, Beevers snapping shot after shot with his camera up to his eye. Most of the Chinese in the Torture Chamber stared at the tableaux beneath them without betraying any feeling at all. A few children chattered and pointed.

  “Great, great stuff,” Beevers said.

  CHAMBER OF BOULDERS, read a plaque before the first scene. THE FIRST COURT. From between the halves of a giant slablike boulder protruded the heads, legs, trunks, arms of people eternally crushed to death. Claw-footed demons in robes pulled screeching children toward the boulder.

  In the SECOND COURT, horned devils pierced sinners with huge pronged forks and held them over flames. Another demon ripped the stomach and intestines from an agonized man. Others hurled children into a long pool of blood.

  A blue demon sliced off the tongue of a man tied to a stake.

  Poole wandered along the path between the exhibits, hearing Harry Beevers’ camera clicking, clicking away.

  Grinning devils cut women in half, sliced men into sections, boiled screaming sinners in vats of oil, grilled them against red hot pillars.…

  Conscious—nearly conscious—of another memory hidden beneath this one, Poole found himself remembering the emergency ward where during his internship he had spent too much time tying blood vessels and cleaning wounds, listening to screams and moans and curses, attending to people with their faces cut to pieces by knives or windshields, people who had nearly killed themselves with drugs …

  … sell me some of that fuckin’ morphine, Doc? a young Puerto Rican in a blood-soaked T-shirt asked him while he frantically sutured a long wound with baseball stitches, sweating as the addict’s blood pooled around him …

  … blood everywhere, blood on the concrete slab, blood on the rocks, severed arms and legs on the floor, naked men hung split open by the knives sprouting from an evil tree …

  “Clean out of my eyesight, man,” Poole heard Conor say. “Hey, Mikey, these guys really believed in survival and fitness, huh?” Survival and fitness? He realized that Conor meant survival of the fittest.

  Why did Beevers want pictures of this stuff?

  He heard the screaming of a long-dead soldier named Cal Hill and heard Dengler’s funny, snide Midwestern voice saying Don’t you think God does all things simultaneously?

  Dengler was right, God did all things simultaneously.

  Every day of those months, Poole had forced himself to go to work. He had forced himself out of bed, into the drizzle of the shower, pulled himself into his clothes, grimly started his car, struggled into his scrub suit in a depression almost too total to be seen. He had gone for days without speaking to anyone. Judy had attributed his gloom, silence, and buried rage to the stresses and miseries of the emergency room, to the presence of people dying literally under his hand, to the abuse pouring out of everyone around him.…

  Sweating in the cool shade of the plaster cave, Poole moved a few paces along. A woman wearing the white hide of a rabbit on her back and a man covered by a pig’s coarse hide knelt before an imperious judge. Poole remembered the rabbit Ernie’s mild beautiful fearful eyes. Other figures busied themselves around them. A monster aimed a spear, a scribe wrote on an eternal scroll. Almost exactly a year later, during his pediatric residency at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in New York, Poole had finally understood.

  And here it was again, that place, in a plaster brain on top of a hill in Singapore.The Tenth CourtFor human souls destined to be reborn as a beast and other lower forms of life, they are provided by the court with the necessary coverings such as fur, hide, feathers, or scales before entering the whirlpool of fate, in order that the eternal souls may take a definite shape.

  Poole heard Beevers laughing to himself outside the grotto.

  He wiped his forehead and walked outside into a blast of heat and a blinding dazzle of sunlight. Harry Beevers stood before him, grinning with all his overlapping teeth.

  A little way down the hill lay a huge pit filled with plaster replicas of giant blue-green crabs. Big black toads stared fixedly out through the mesh. In another brain-grotto on the other side of the path a giant woman with a chicken’s head and corpse-white arms yanked at the arm of her husband, who had the wattled head of a duck. Poole saw murder in the woman’s determination, the duck-man’s alarm. Marriage was murder.

  Beevers snapped off another picture. “This is great,” he said, and turned around to focus on
the giant wrinkled brain they had just left. TORTURE CHAMBER HERE.

  “There are girls in New York,” Beevers said, “who will go crazy when they see these pictures. You don’t think that’s right? There are girls in New York who’d go down on Gabby Hayes if he showed them this stuff.”

  Conor Linklater strolled away laughing.

  “You think I don’t know what I’m talking about?” His voice was too loud. “Ask Pumo—he hangs out where I hang out, he knows.”

  4

  After they left the Tiger Balm Gardens they walked for a long time without quite knowing where they were or where they were going. “Maybe we should go back to the Gardens,” Conor said. “This is nowhere.”

  It was nearly a literal, though a peaceful, nowhere. They were walking uphill along a smooth grey road between a high bank covered with perfectly mown grass and a long slope dotted with bungalows set at wide intervals amongst the trees. Since leaving the Gardens the only human being they had seen had been a uniformed chauffeur in sunglasses driving an otherwise empty black Mercedes Benz 500 SEL.

  “We must have walked over a mile already,” Beevers said. He had torn the map out of Papineau’s Guide, and was turning it over and over in his hands. “You can turn back by yourself if you want to. There’ll be something at the top of this hill. Pretty soon Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello will drive by in a woodie. Goddamn, I can’t find where we are on the fucking map.” He almost immediately stopped walking and stared at a certain point on the misleading map. “That stupid shit Underhill.”

  “Why?” Conor asked.

  “Boogey Street isn’t Boogey Street. That dodo didn’t know what he was talking about. It’s B-U-G-I-S Street. Boo-giss Street. That has to be it, there isn’t anything else even close.”

  “But I thought the cabdriver …?”

  “It’s still Boo-giss Street, it says so right here.” He looked up with wild eyes. “If Underhill didn’t know where he was going, how the hell does he expect us to find him?”

  They trudged further uphill and came to an intersection without roadsigns. Beevers resolutely turned right and began marching off. Conor protested that the center of town and their hotel were the other way, but Beevers continued walking until they gave in and joined him.

  Half an hour later an amazed-looking taxi driver stopped and picked them up.

  “Marco Polo Hotel,” Beevers said. He was breathing heavily, and his face had become so mottled Poole could not tell if it was pink flecked with white, or white flecked with pink. A sweat stain shaped like a torpedo darkened the back of his jacket from shoulder to shoulder and extended a damp fin down to the small of his back. “I have to have a shower and a nap.”

  “Why you going in opposite direction?” the driver asked.

  Beevers refused to speak.

  “Hey, we got a little bet going,” Conor said. “Is it Boo-giss Street or Boogey Street?”

  “Is same thing,” the driver said.

  1

  As far as Conor was concerned, this whole Bugis Street deal stank. Fifty feet from its entrance, where the cabdriver from the restaurant had pointed to it, Bugis Street looked just right for a guy like Underhill. Lots of flashing lights, bar signs, neon, crowds of people milling around. But once you were actually there, you saw who those people were and you knew that Tim Underhill wouldn’t go anywhere near them. White-haired ladies with leathery, saggy upper arms holding hands with turtle-faced old parties in baggy shorts and Supp-Hose. They had the lost, childlike air of tourists anywhere, as if what they were looking at were no more real than a television commercial. About half the people Conor could see walking up and down Bugis Street had clearly arrived in the JASMINE FAR EAST TOUR buses parked outside the entrance to the street. Way up above everybody’s heads, a pale blue flag drooped from the top of a long pole held by a breezy young blonde woman in a crisp, starched-looking blazer of the same pale blue.

  If this bunch of ham and eggers came traipsing through South Norwalk, Conor knew he wouldn’t be able to ignore them the way the other half of the people on Bugis Street were doing. Shifty-looking little guys darted in and out of the bars and shops. Pairs of whores in wigs and tight dresses strutted up and down the street. If you were a player in Singapore, this is where you came—Conor guessed that they had developed selective vision, and no longer really saw the tourists.

  Conor could hear the Stones’ “Jumping Jack Flash” drilling through some slow-moving cowboy song from Porter Waggoner, both of them battling the strange caterwauling of what must have been a Chinese opera—screechy voices beating up a melody that would give a headache to a dog. This noise was piped out of different bars through little speakers set above the doors, usually right above the head of a beckoning doorman. The whole thing gave Conor a headache. Probably the brandy after their dinner at the Pine Court didn’t help, even if it was XO, which Harry Beevers claimed was liquid gold. Feeling as if cymbals were being slammed together next to his ears, Conor walked along behind Beevers and Mike Poole.

  “Might as well start right here,” Mike said, turning toward the first bar on their side of the street, the Orient Song. The doorman straightened up as they approached and began waving them in with both arms. “Orient Song your bar,” he yelled. “Come to Orient Song! Best bar on Bugis Street! Americans all come here!”

  Near the door a little old man in a dirty white smock twitched into life. He grinned, showing sparse yellow teeth, and swept his arm theatrically toward the display of framed photographs next to him.

  They were eight-by-twelve glossies, black and white, with names printed in the white space just above the bottom of the frame. Dawn, Rose, Hotlips, Raven, Billie Blue … parted lips and arched necks, sex-drenched Oriental faces framed in soft black hair, plucked eyebrows above willful eyes.

  “Four dollars,” the old man said.

  Harry Beevers grabbed Conor’s forearm and pulled him through the heavy door. Cold air-conditioned air chilled the sweat on Conor’s forehead, and he yanked his arm out of Beevers’ grasp. Americans, paired like Mallard ducks, turned smiling toward them from their stations near the bar.

  “No luck here,” Beevers said. “This is just a tour bus joint. The first bar on the street is the only one these yo-yos feel safe in.”

  Poole said, “Let’s ask anyhow.”

  At least the entire front half of the bar was taken up by American couples in their sixties and seventies. Conor could dimly hear someone banging chords on a piano. Out of the general hum of voices Conor heard a female voice calling someone Son and asking where his nametag was. He eventually realized that she was addressing him.

  “You gotta get the spirit, boy, you gotta wear the tag. We’re a fun bunch!” Conor looked down at the sun-tanned, heavily wrinkled face of a woman beaming at him and wearing a nametag which read HI! ETHEL’S A JAUNTY JASMINE!

  Conor looked over her head. Behind her a couple of old boys in rimless glasses who looked like the doctors on the flight over were checking him out less benevolently—he was wearing his Agent Orange T-shirt, and did not resemble a Jaunty Jasmine.

  He saw Beevers and Poole approaching the bar, where a stocky man wearing a velvet bow tie was serving drinks, washing glasses, and talking out of the side of his mouth all at once. He reminded Conor of Jimmy Lah. The back of the bar was another world. On the far side of all the Jasmines, parties of Chinese men sat around round tables drinking brandy from magnums, shouting jokes at one another, and desultorily talking with the girls who drifted by their tables. Far at the back a black-haired man in a tuxedo who looked neither Chinese nor Caucasian sat at a baby grand, singing words Conor could not hear.

  He squeezed past the woman, who went on mouthing cheerful meaningless sounds, and got to the bar just as Mikey took one of the photographs of Underhill out of the envelope. “Let’s have a drink, what d’you say, gimme a vodka on the rocks.”

  The bartender blinked, and a brimming glass appeared on the bar before Conor. Beevers already had one, Conor saw.
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  “Don’t know him,” the bartender said. “Five dollars.”

  “Maybe you remember him from years back,” Beevers said. “He would have started coming here around 1969, ’70, around then.”

  “Too long ago. I was little boy. Still in school. Wif da priests.”

  “Take another look,” Beevers said.

  The bartender removed the picture from Poole’s fingers and flipped it over his shoulder. “He is a priest. Named Father Ball-cock. I don’t know him.”

  As soon as they got back out onto the humid street, Harry Beevers took a step ahead of the other two and faced them with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders raised. “I don’t care, I have to say it. I get the wrong vibes entirely from this place. There isn’t a chance in hell that Underhill’s still here. My gut tells me to go to Taipei—it’s more like his kind of place. Take my word for it.”

  Poole laughed. “Not so fast, we just got started. There are at least twenty more bars on this street. Somewhere along the line, someone will know him.”

  “Yeah, someone has to know him,” Conor said. He felt more confident of this after having put down his vodka.

  “Ah, the peanut gallery has an opinion too,” Beevers said.

  “You got your rocks off in Taipei, so you want to go back there now,” Conor said. “It’s so fucking obvious.” He stomped away to avoid hitting Beevers. Cries of “Best bar! Best bar!” erupted from various doormen. Conor felt his shirt sticking to his back.