Koko brt-1

by Peter Straub

  Bangkok aroused some of the same feelings in him as Dinky Dau’s gun. At the dedication of the Memorial, fourteen years of his life had just dropped away. He had been a raw nerve, a boy soldier again, invisible inside nice, comfortable, humane Dr. Poole. It seethed that nice comfortable Dr. Poole was only the scaffolding around that raw nerve.

  How strange it was to be so invisible, his real self so invisible to others. Michael wished that Conor and Pumo had gone to Tracers with him.

  Michael and Conor walked past a dusty window filled with trusses and artificial legs like amputations, bent at the knee. “You know,” Conor said, “I’m homesick. I want to eat a hamburger. I want a beer that doesn’t taste like it was made with stuff they swept up off the street. I want to be able to go to the can again—that shit I got from the doctor closed my asshole so tight it’s just a seam. You know the worst? I even want to pick up my toolchest again. I want to come home from work, clean up, and get down to my good old bar. Don’t you miss stuff like that, Mikey?”

  “Not exactly,” Poole said.

  “Don’t you miss work?” Conor’s eyebrows lifted. “Don’t you miss getting on your whatsit, your stethoscope, all that? Telling kids it’s only gonna hurt a little bit?”

  “I don’t really miss that side of it,” Poole said. “In fact, I haven’t been very happy with my practice lately.”

  “Don’t you miss anything?”

  I miss a girl in St. Bart’s hospital, Michael thought, but finally said, “Some of my patients, I guess.”

  Conor gave him a suspicious look and suggested they turn around and take a look at Patpat before they caught Black Lung disease. They had come nearly all the way to Charoen Krung Road, the Oriental Hotel, and the river.

  “Patpong,” Michael corrected. “Where Dengler was killed.”

  “Oh, that Patpong,” Conor said.

  If Patpong held an initial surprise, it was that it was no larger than what Poole had seen from his window. The section of Bangkok that attracted male tourists from all over America, Europe, and Asia was only three streets long and one street wide. Poole had imagined that like the St. Pauli section of Hamburg it covered at least a few more blocks. At five in the afternoon, the neon signs blazed above the heads of the crowds of men going in and out of the bars and massage parlors. 123 GIRLS WET. SMOKING. A tout positioned at the bottom of a flight of stairs whistled at Poole and slipped into his hands a brochure listing the specialties of the house.

  Beautiful girl hostesses—continuous show!

  1 free drink per customer

  All languages, international clientele

  Ping-Pong balls

  Smoking

  Magic Marker

  Coca Cola

  Striptease

  Woman-woman

  Man-woman

  Man-woman-woman

  Room for use and observe

  As he read this document, a small Thai male interposed himself between Michael and Conor. “You in good time,” he said. “Late is too late. Choose now, you get best.” He took a fat credit-card holder from his jacket pocket, and let it drop down in segments, flipping open as it fell to reveal photographs of perhaps sixty naked girls. “Pick now—late is too late.” He grinned, wonderfully at ease with himself, his product, and his message, and showed bright gold incisors.

  He held the ribbon of photographs up to Conor’s face. “All available! Going fast!”

  Michael saw Conor’s face turn red, and pulled him down the street, shooing the massage parlor tout away with his other hand.

  The tout waggled his photos in the air and made them shimmy.

  “Boys, too. Pretty boys, boys all sizes. Later is too late, especially for boys.” From another pocket he withdrew another wad of photographs. These too he let waterfall out of his palm. “Beautiful, hot, suck you, fuck you, smoke you—”

  “Telephone,” Poole said, thinking he had read the word on the menu from the sex club.

  The tout frowned and shook his head. “No telephone—what you want? You on death trip?” He started to fold and gather his photographs into stacks as he backed away from them. For a moment he regarded them both very shrewdly. “You two guys on real death trip? Real kinky? Must be very, very careful.”

  “What’s with this guy?” Conor said. “Show him the picture.”

  The little tout was looking nervously from side to side. He had folded his wares into his jacket pockets. Poole held out one of the photographs from the manila envelope. The tout licked his lips with a long colorless tongue. The man stepped backward, grinned emptily at Conor and Michael, and transferred his attentions to a tall white boy in a Twisted Sister T-shirt.

  “I don’t know about you,” Conor said, “but I could use a beer.”

  Poole nodded, and followed him up the stairs to the Montparnasse Bar. Conor disappeared through a curtain of blue plastic streamers, and Michael followed him into a small, dimly lighted room ringed with chairs. From one wall jutted a tiny bar behind which stood a huge Samoan in a tight red muscle shirt. A small raised wooden stage took up the front of the room. Conor was handing bills to an obese woman seated at a desk just inside the door. “Admission, twenty baht,” she croaked at Poole.

  Poole glanced toward the stage, where a chunky Thai girl wearing a bra was doing something that required her to hunch down over her splayed knees. A dozen undressed girls inspected Poole and Conor. The only other man in the room was a drunken Australian bulging out of a sweat-stained tan suit and clutching a tall can of Foster’s Lager. A girl was curled up in his lap, playing with his necktie and whispering into his ear.

  “You know what I was trying to think of, out on the street?” Michael asked. “Smoking.”

  “I hope they don’t have it,” Conor said.

  The girl onstage flashed a broad smile and cupped her hands just below her vagina. A Ping-Pong ball appeared in its folds, then disappeared back up inside her, then finally dropped out onto her palm. Another Ping-Pong ball popped into view.

  Four girls had appeared around them, smiling and cooing. Two sat in the chairs on either side of them, and the other two kneeled.

  “You very handsome,” said the girl before Poole. She began to stroke his knee. “You be my husban’?”

  “Hey,” Conor said, “if these people can do shit like that with Ping-Pong balls …”

  They ordered drinks for two of the girls, and the others padded across the room. Onstage, the Ping-Pong balls were rotating in and out of sight with the speed of a revolving door.

  The girl beside Poole whispered, “You hard yet? I make hard.”

  Another strikingly pretty girl emerged through the curtain of streamers beside the stage. She was naked, and to Poole she looked no older than fifteen. The girl smiled at the men and women before her, then displayed a cigarette at the end of her fingers like a tiny baton, and lit it with a pink disposable lighter.

  The girl bent backwards with a smooth acrobatic motion, thrusting her slender legs and pubis at the audience, and planted one hand on the floor. With the other she reached between her legs and inserted the cigarette into her vagina.

  “This is getting deep,” Conor said.

  The tip of the cigarette glowed, and half an inch of ash formed at the tip. The girl reached forward and removed the cigarette. A plume of smoke blew from her vagina. She repeated this performance several times. Poole’s girl began stroking the inside of his thigh and talking to him about growing up in the country.

  “My momma poor,” she said. “My village poor-poor. Many many days, no eat. You take me back to America? I be your wife. Be good wife.”

  “I already have a wife.”

  “Okay, I be number-two wife. Number two be best wife.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” he said, looking at the girl’s dimpled face. He drank his beer and felt very tired and comradely.

  “In Thailand, many men have number-two wife,” she said.

  The teenager onstage blew a perfect smoke ring out of her vagina. “
Pussy blow fractals!” the Australian yelled. “Record collectors are fun to go around with, cricketers swing big bats, but mathematicians are in their prime!”

  “You have many television sets?” the girl asked Poole.

  “Many.”

  “You have washer-dryer?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Gas or electric?”

  Poole considered. “Gas.”

  The girl pursed her lips. “You have two cars?”

  “Of course.”

  “You get extra car for me?”

  “In America, everybody gets their own car. Even children get their own car.”

  “You have children?”

  “No.”

  “I give children,” the whore said. “You nice man. Two children, three children, all you want. Give American names. Tommy. Sally.”

  “Nice kids,” Poole said. “I miss them already.”

  “We have best sex, your whole life long. Even sex with your wife get better.”

  “I don’t have sex with my wife,” Poole said, amazing himself.

  “Then we have twice as much sex, make up.”

  “Pussy smoke cigarette, now pussy talk telephone,” the Australian said. “Pussy call University of Queensland, tell them I’ll be late.”

  The nymph onstage sprang upright and bowed. All the girls, the Australian, and Poole applauded loudly. When she walked off, a tall, naked young woman came through the streamers with a big folder of paper and a handful of Magic Markers.

  Poole finished his beer and watched the girl onstage plant two Magic Markers in her vagina and hunker over a large sheet of paper to draw a very creditable horse.

  “Where do gay men go in Bangkok?” Poole asked. “We’re looking for a friend of ours.”

  “Patpong three. Two streets up. Gayboys. You are not a gayboy?”

  Poole shook his head.

  “Come in back with me. I smoke you.” She threw her arms around his neck. Her skin had a delicious fragrance akin to the smell of apples, oiled leather, and cloves.

  Poole and Conor left as the artist onstage was completing a landscape with mountains, a beach and palm trees, sailboats, and a sun with rays.

  Just down the block from the Montparnasse were two dun-colored steps leading up to an open door and a sign reading PATPONG BOOKS. While Poole discovered the row of Underhill’s novels, Conor went off to look at magazines. Poole asked both the clerk on duty and the manager if they knew or had ever seen Tim Underhill, but neither man even knew his name. Poole bought the hardcover copy of The Divided Man he had carried up to the register to ask about, then he and Conor went out to have a beer at the Mississippi Queen.

  “Hell, I signed one of those Koko cards myself,” Conor said at the bar.

  “I did too,” Poole said. “When was yours?” He had never imagined that only one member of the platoon had cut off ears and written Koko on a regimental card, but Conor’s admission gave him a mixture of surprise and pleasure.

  “The day after Ho Chi Minn’s birthday. We had to go out on some damn coordinated patrol with platoon two. Just like on Ho’s birthday. Except that this time the NVA mined the perimeter, and one of the tanks hit a fragmentation mine. Which slowed everything way, way down. Remember crawling out along the road, probing for the rest of the mines? Shoulder to shoulder? Anyhow, after that, Underhill surprised their point man out in the bushes, and we got the rest of ’em in a killing box.”

  “Right,” Poole said. He could remember seeing the North Vietnamese soldiers moving like ghosts, like deer, along the road. They had not been boys. They were men in their thirties and forties, lifelong soldiers in a lifelong war. He had wanted very much to kill them.

  “So when it was all over, I went back and did the point man.” A tiny girl in a black leather bra and black leather microskirt had taken the stool beside Conor, and was bending over the bar grinning at him to catch his attention. “I mean, I can remember cutting that dude’s ears off,” Conor said. “It was hard to do, man. An ear is all like gristle. You wind up only cutting off the top part, and it doesn’t look like an ear. It was like I wasn’t thinking, like I wasn’t even myself. I had to keep on sawing back and forth. And when I cut through it, his head slapped right down on the mud and I was holding this ear. Then I had to roll him over and do it all over again.”

  The girl, who had listened carefully to this speech, pushed herself away from the bar and went across the big room to whisper to another bar girl.

  “What did you do with the ear?” Poole asked.

  “Threw it into the trees. I’m no pervert.”

  “Right,” Poole agreed. “It would be pretty sick to save the ears.”

  “Damn straight,” Conor said.

  3

  The telephone had gone from making a buzzing sound to total dead silence to a high-pitched whistle. Conor looked up from the pictures of naked girls in the magazine he had bought at Patpong Books.

  “When did you do yours?” Conor said.

  “My what?”

  “Koko card.”

  “About a month after the court-martials were announced. It was after a patrol in the A Shau Valley.”

  “End of September,” Conor said. “I remember that one. I picked up the bodies.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “In the tunnel—where the other big cache was. The rice cache.”

  “That’s the one,” Poole said.

  “Old Mikey,” Conor said. “You’re an animal, man.”

  “I still don’t know how I did it,” Poole said. “Gave me nightmares for years.”

  Then the operator cut through the whistling to say, “We are connecting you to your party, sir,” and Michael Poole readied himself to talk to his wife while still holding up before him, fresh from its long internment within him, the memory of using his K-Bar to saw off the ears of a corpse propped up against a fifty-pound bag of rice. And the darker memory of using his knife on the dead man’s eyes.

  Victor Spitalny had seen the body first, and had come out of the tunnel bawling Awww Righht!

  The silence deepened and changed texture. Two deep thudding clicks came over the line, like firm but complex linkages made in deep space.

  Poole looked at his watch. Seven o’clock P.M. in Bangkok, seven in the morning in Westerholm, New York.

  After all this time he heard the sound, familiar as a lullaby, of the American dial tone, which abruptly ceased. More deep-space silence, followed by the dim ringing of a telephone.

  The telephone ceased ringing with a clunk that meant the answering machine was on. At seven in the morning, Judy was either still in the bedroom or down in the kitchen.

  Michael waited through Judy’s message. When the beep came, he said, “Judy? Are you home? This is Michael.”

  He waited three, four, five beats. “Judy?” He was about to hang up where he heard a loud click and his wife said, “So it’s you,” in a flat, uninflected voice.

  “Hello. I’m glad you answered.”

  “I guess I’m glad too. Are the children having fun in the sun?”

  “Judy—”

  “Are they?”

  Poole had a quick, guilty flash of the girl rubbing his crotch. “I suppose you could call it fun. We’re still looking for Tim Underhill.”

  “How nice for you.”

  “We learned that he left Singapore, so Beevers is in Taipei and Conor and I are in Bangkok. I think we might find him in the next few days.”

  “Dandy. You’re in Bangkok, reliving your venereal youth, and I’m doing my job in Westerholm, which happens to be the location of your house and your medical practice. You remember, I hope, if your faulty short-term memory has not already erased it, that I wasn’t exactly overjoyed when you announced that you were taking this trip of yours?”

  “I didn’t exactly announce it in that sense, Judy.”

  “Bad short-term memory, what did I tell you?”

  “I thought you’d be happy to hear from me.”

  “I do
n’t precisely wish you ill, no matter what you may think.”

  “I never thought you did.”

  “In a way I’m almost glad you left, because it gives me the space for some long-overdue thinking about our relationship. I really wonder whether we’re doing either one of us any good anymore.”

  “You want to talk about that now?”

  “Just tell me one thing—did you ask one of your little friends to call me up periodically, to check on whether or not I’m home?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I am talking about the little gnome who loves the sound of my voice on the answering machine so much that he calls up two or three times a day. And by the way, I don’t care if you don’t trust me anymore than that because I am a person who takes responsibility for herself around here, Michael, and I always have been.”

  “You’re getting anonymous phone calls?” Michael asked, grateful to have discovered a reason for his wife’s hostility.

  “As if you didn’t know.”

  “Oh, Judy,” he said, and his pain and regret were very clear in his voice.

  “All right,” she said. “Okay.”

  “Call the police.”

  “What good will that do?”

  “If he calls that often, they’ll be able to nail him.”

  There was a long silence between them that to Michael seemed almost comfortable, marital.

  “This is wasting money,” Judy said.

  “It’s probably some student’s idea of a joke. You need to relax a little, Judy.”

  She hesitated. “Well, Bob Bunce asked me for dinner tomorrow night. It’ll be nice to get out of the house.”