Koko brt-1

by Peter Straub

  The painter went up into La Gamal and Pumo let himself into Saigon. The bar where Harry Beevers had spent so many of the hours he should have given to Caldwell, Moran, Morrissey had been extended and topped with the most beautiful sheet of black walnut Pumo had ever seen; beyond this lay the empty, still barren dining room. Pumo picked his way across the floor in the darkness and let himself into the kitchen. Here there were lights, and Pumo threw them on. Then he went down on his hands and knees and looked under the range and refrigerator, behind the freezers and the storage shelves, and at every inch of floor in the place. He saw no insect of any kind.

  Pumo went into Vinh’s little room. The bed was neatly made. Vinh’s books—poetry, novels, histories, and cookbooks in French, English, and Vietnamese—stood in ranks on the shelves he had made. Pumo looked under the bed and the little chest of drawers without seeing any giant bugs.

  He heard no little hooves rapping against his new tiles.

  Pumo locked up and went upstairs to his loft. There he finally took off his coat and walked into his bedroom and, without turning on any lights, looked down onto Grand Street. More people were going up the stairs to La Gamal, some of them people who otherwise would be coming to Saigon with their stomachs empty and their wallets out. Everybody was moving swiftly up and down the street, nobody loitered or lingered, nobody was staring up at his window. Maggie would decide whether or not she would come down tonight. Probably she would stay uptown. All of this seemed very familiar. Maggie would not call for days, he’d start to go crazy, there’d be enigmatic little ads in the Voice, the whole thing would start up all over again. Foodcat misses Half Moon. Maybe this time he would not have to get half killed to bring her back—maybe this time he would have some sense. But for tonight, Maggie would be better off uptown. Pumo knew his old need to be alone, where he could not contaminate any other human being with his troubles.

  He made himself a drink at the bar behind his desk and carried it down to the couch to wait for Vinh to return.

  When the downstairs buzzer rang, Pumo thought that his chef must have gone off to Canal Street without his keys, and he nearly pushed the little button to let him in without speaking into the little grille that let him interview his callers. But he thought twice, and leaned toward the grille and asked, “Who is it?”

  A voice said, “Delivery.”

  The son-in-law, with a van full of cast-iron kitchenware and two or three boxes of knives. If Leung had sent them without waiting for Tina’s instructions, he must have given him the old price. Tina said, “I’ll be right there,” and pushed the button to unlock the door and admit his caller.

  4

  “So you think I ought to go back to him tonight?” Maggie trailed after the General as if clinging close to his broad military back for warmth and strength—she was not levitating now.

  “I didn’t say that.” The General darted into one of the aisles of his impromptu church to align a chair. Everything around them, the red vinyl of the seats, the yellow walls with the garish oils of a pigtailed Jesus confronting demons in a misty Chinese landscape, the cheap blond wood of the altar, gleamed and sparkled and shone in the harsh bright light the General and his congregation preferred to any other sort of lighting. And he and Maggie spoke in the Cantonese, similarly hard and brilliant, in which he conducted his services.

  Standing by herself before the shuttered Harlem window, Maggie looked nearly bereft. “Then I apologize. I didn’t understand.”

  The General straightened up and nodded approvingly. He went back to the aisle, stepped around her, and proceeded up the side of the church to the altar rail and the altar.

  Maggie followed him as far as the rail. The General made minute adjustments to the white cloth on the altar, and at length looked at her again.

  “You have always been an intelligent girl. You just have never understood yourself. But the things you do! The way you live!”

  “I do not live badly,” Maggie said. This looked like another replay of an old, old argument, and she suddenly wanted to leave, to go downtown and stay with Jules and Perry in one of their rickety East Village tenements, to escape into their mindless club-hopping and their mindless acceptance of her.

  “I mean—living in such ignorance of yourself,” the General said mildly.

  “What shall I do, then?” she asked, unable to keep the irony out of her voice.

  “You are a caretaker,” the General said. “You are a person who goes where she is needed. Your friend was in great need of your help. You brought him back to health so successfully that he no longer required your assistance, your caretaking, and all his usual problems returned to him. I know men like him. It will be years before he gets to the end of what combat did to him.”

  “Do you think Americans are too sentimental to be good soldiers?” Maggie asked, really curious to know if he did think this.

  “I am not a philosopher,” the General said. He went into a storeroom behind the altar and returned carrying a stack of hymnals. Knowing what was expected of her, Maggie came forward and took the hymnals from him. “But you would perhaps be a better soldier than your friend. I have known some caretakers who were excellent officers. Your father had a great deal of the caretaker in him.”

  “Did he go where he was needed?”

  “He often went where I needed him,” the General said.

  They were walking side by side down parallel aisles, placing hymnals face up on the chairs.

  “And now I suppose you want me to go somewhere,” she said at last.

  “You are doing nothing now, Maggie. You help me out here in my church. You live with your old soldier. I am sure you do a great many things for his restaurant.”

  “I try,” Maggie said.

  “And if you lived with a painter, you would find the best brushes in the city, you would prepare the canvases as they were never prepared before, and you would end up getting him into famous galleries and museums.”

  “That’s right,” she said, struck by this vision.

  “So either you marry some man here and live his life by proxy, being his partner if he will let you, or you have your own life by yourself.”

  “In Taiwan,” she said, for eventually they would come to this point.

  “It is as good as anywhere else, and better for you. I will forget about your brother. Jimmy would be the same anywhere, so he might as well stay here. But you could go to college in Taipei now, and then train for a career.”

  “What career?”

  “Medicine,” he said, and looked at her fully and frankly. “I can pay for your tuition.”

  She nearly laughed out loud in astonishment, and then tried to make a joke of it. “Well, at least you didn’t say nursing!”

  “I thought about that, too.” He went on setting down the hymnals. “It would take less time, and cost much less money. But wouldn’t you rather be a doctor?”

  She thought of Pumo and said, “Maybe I ought to be a psychiatrist!”

  “Maybe you ought,” he said, and she saw that he knew exactly what she was thinking.

  “Always the caretaker,” he said. “Do you remember your mother reading Babar to you? The book about the elephant?”

  “The books,” she said, for her memory of the French children’s books, which both parents had read to Maggie during her early childhood, was very clear.

  “I was remembering a sentence from one of them—something King Babar says. ‘Truly it is not easy to bring up a family.’ ”

  “Oh, you did all right,” Maggie said.

  “I wish I had done better.”

  “Well, I was only the tiniest of families.” Maggie smiled over the rank of intervening chairs and patted his thick old hand. “I haven’t thought of those books in years. Where are they?”

  “I have them.”

  “I’d like them someday.” Now they were both smiling. “I always liked the Old Lady.”

  “See? Another caretaker.”

  Maggie laughed out loud, a
nd if Pumo had seen her at that moment, he would have said that she had begun to levitate again.

  “I would never insist you follow any design of mine,” the General said. “If you decide to marry your old soldier, I would be happy for you. I would just want you to know that you were his caretaker as well as his wife.”

  This was too much for Maggie, and she turned them back onto safer ground. “I could sing him the song of the elephants. Do you remember that?”

  He cocked his close-shaven authoritative head. Maggie was very grateful that he had at least met Tina Pumo, and promised herself that she would bring whatever man or men became important to her up before the General’s inspection.

  “All I remember is that it was supposed to be very old.” He smiled and said, “From the days of the mammoths,” as if he were old enough to have seen them himself.

  Maggie sang the song from Babar the King: “ ‘Patali di rapato/Cromda cromda ripalo/Pata pata/Ko ko ko.’

  “That’s the first verse. I can’t remember the other two, but they end the same way—‘Pata pata/Ko ko ko.’ ”

  As soon as she had sung the words again she knew that she was going to go back down to Grand Street.

  5

  About the same time that Tina Pumo pressed the button to unlock his street door and Maggie Lah went up the steps to the 125th Street subway stop, wondering if Tina would still be in his infantile mood, Judy Poole called up Pat Caldwell to have a serious conversation. Judy imagined that Pat Caldwell was very likely the most satisfactory person in the world with whom to have a serious conversation. She did not judge other people in the way that most people of Judy’s acquaintance, and Judy herself, judged others. Judy attributed this to the liberating effect of having been born into a great fortune and grown up to be a kind of displaced princess who went around pretending to be poor. Pat Caldwell had been born far richer than even Bob Bunce, and Judy imagined that if she had been born with such an enormous silver spoon in her mouth, she, too, might have learned to be so artless about concealing it. Really rich people made the only convincing liberals. And Pat Caldwell had known Judy Poole for more than ten years, ever since Michael and Harry Beevers had left the army—they had made a perfect foursome, Judy thought. Or would have, if Harry Beevers had not been so insecure. Harry had nearly ruined their friendship. Even Michael hadn’t liked him.

  “It’s all because of Ia Thuc,” she said to Pat, once they were talking. “You know what they remind me of? The men who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, the ones who fell apart and turned into drunks. They let it become too much for them—almost as if they expected to be punished for it.”

  “Harry never expected to be punished for it,” Pat said. “But Harry never expected to be punished for anything. Don’t be too hard on Michael.”

  “I used to try not to be,” Judy said. “I’m not sure it’s worth the trouble anymore.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “Well, you got divorced.”

  “Well, I had reasons,” Pat said. “Reasons on top of reasons. Reasons inside reasons. You don’t want to know about all that.”

  Judy did want to know—Michael had told her that he thought Beevers was a wife beater—but felt that she could not come out and ask.

  “Michael called from Bangkok,” she said after a pause, “and I was terrible to him. I don’t like myself when I’m like that. I even told him I was going out with someone else.”

  “I see,” Pat said. “When the cat’s away?”

  “Bob is a very nice, very dedicated, very stable man,” Judy said, somewhat defensively. “Michael and I haven’t really been close since Robbie died.”

  “I see,” Pat repeated. “Do you mean you’re serious about your friend?”

  “I could be. He’s healthy. He never shot anybody. He sails. He plays tennis. He doesn’t have nightmares. He isn’t carrying poison and disease around inside him.…” Judy astonished herself by beginning to cry. “I’m lonely—Michael makes me lonely. All I want is to be an ordinary person and to have an ordinary middle-class life.” She began to cry again, and took a moment to steady her voice. “Is that a lot to ask for?”

  “Depends on who’s asking,” Pat said reasonably. “But clearly you don’t think so.”

  “I don’t,” Judy fairly wailed. “I’ve worked hard all my life! I wasn’t born in Westerholm, you know. I’m proud of my home and my accomplishments, my achievements, the whole way we live! That counts! I’ve never asked for a handout, I never took anybody’s charity. I made a good place for myself in one of the most exclusive, expensive towns in the entire country. That means something.”

  “No one would dispute that,” Pat soothed.

  “You don’t know Michael,” Judy said. “He’s perfectly willing to throw it all away. I think he hates Westerholm. He wants to throw everything away and go live in a slum, it’s like he wants to cover himself with ashes, he can’t stand anything nice …”

  “Is he sick?” Pat asked. “You said something about poison and disease.…”

  “The war got inside him, he carried death around inside him, he sees everything upside-down, I think the only person he really likes here is a girl who’s dying of cancer, he dotes on her, he gives her books to read and he finds excuses to see her, it’s awful, it’s because she’s dying, she’s like Robbie, she’s a smart Robbie.…” Now Judy was in tears again. “Ah, I loved that poor kid. But when he died I put all his things away, I was determined to put it all behind me and get on with things.… Oh, I suppose you’ll never forgive me for getting so emotional.”

  “Of course I forgive you, there’s nothing to forgive. You’re upset. But are you implying that Michael is suffering from an Agent Orange-related illness?”

  “Have you ever lived with a doctor?” Judy laughed unpleasantly. “Do you know how hard it is to get a doctor to go to a doctor? Michael’s not healthy, I know that much. He won’t go for a checkup, he’s like some primitive old man, he’s waiting for it to go away—but I know what it is! It’s Vietnam, it’s Ia Thuc! He swallowed Ia Thuc, he ate the whole thing up, he drank it the way you’d drink some poison, and it’s eating him up. For all I know, he blames me for all his problems.” She paused, and collected herself. “Then, as if all that wasn’t enough, there’s my anonymous caller. You ever have one of those?”

  “I’ve had a few obscene telephone calls,” Pat said. “And Harry used to call me up, after I made him move out of my apartment. He never admitted it, but he’d stay on the phone, just sort of breathing, hoping I’d get scared or feel sorry for him or something.”

  “Maybe Harry’s calling me up!” Judy uttered a muffled sound that might have been laughter.

  6

  Intimations that something had gone wrong followed Maggie all the way to Pumo’s door. A crowd of boys at the subway’s exit surrounded her as soon as she came up the steps, dancing in close to her and calling her “little Chinkie.” “I show you a good time, little Chinkie.” They were just aimless, bored adolescents, too frightened of women to approach them individually, but Maggie suddenly felt too scared of them to risk doing anything but shoving her hands into her pockets, averting her head, and walking straight ahead. The odor of marijuana surrounded the boys like a cloud. Where was Pumo? Why didn’t he answer his phone? “Look at me, look at me, look at me,” one of the boys begged, and Maggie lifted her chin and gave him a look so powerful that he fell back on the spot.

  The rest of the boys continued following her for nearly a block, making half-intelligible growls and yells. The night had become very cold, and the wind burned Maggie’s face. The street-lamps shed a morbid yellow light.

  She needed time to absorb the General’s offer. She would not reject it without fully considering it, and she might not reject it at all. It was possible that in time the General might accept her training at a medical school in New York, if any such school would take her in. If she were a medical student with her own room up in Washington Heights or over in Brooklyn, if she were busier than an
y four restaurant owners, if Tina could see that she had her own life … then he couldn’t accuse her of making a meal of his own.

  The worst intimation yet that something had gone wrong interrupted the pleasant pictures this possibility gave her. From the end of the block Maggie had been seeing a sliver of yellow light beside the entrance to Saigon, and had taken for granted that it was a reflection in a pane of glass or a strip of polished metal awaiting storage inside the foyer. Now it struck Maggie that it was at least half an hour too late for the workmen to be around. In this neighborhood, they would never leave anything outside at night.

  As soon as she got closer to the restaurant, Maggie saw that the door itself hung open half an inch, letting the light from the staircase spill out. This was not merely an intimation of trouble, it rang like an alarm bell. Pumo would not have left his street door gaping open in a thousand lifetimes. Maggie jogged toward the shaft of light.

  When she put her hand on the door, she realized that if Pumo had not left it open, some other person had. She was already pressing the buzzer that communicated with the apartment, and snatched her hand away before it gave any more than the dot of Morse code.

  She hung in the doorway a moment, fairly panting with indecision. She moved a few steps to the side and pushed the buzzer for the restaurant, thinking that Vinh might be inside. She pressed it again, and this time held it down, but nothing happened. Vinh was not home.

  There was a pay telephone around the corner on West Broadway, and Maggie moved away to call the police. But maybe Pumo had simply left the door unlocked, and was sitting upstairs in a blue funk.

  Or maybe Dracula had returned to ransack the loft. The memory of how she had found Pumo lying on sheets stiff with drying blood moved her back to the door again and lifted her hand to the buzzer. She pushed, held it down longer than she had the restaurant’s buzzer, and listened to the noise ring out through the loft and down the stairs.