by Peter Straub
Pumo yelled Spitalny’s name, but Spitalny only turned his head and kept on running. Running with his head turned, he looked like an image on a frieze.
The three men disappeared into the cave.
Poole turned back to the village and saw Tim Underhill trudging toward him through the smoke.
Both men heard a muffled rattle of fire come from the cave. It died with such swiftness it seemed never to have been. Behind them came the snapping and crunching of a hootch falling in on itself. The villagers continued wailing. From the cave came again the muffled sound of an M-16 firing in bursts. Poole’s mind and body unfroze, and he began to run through the smoke toward the cave. He dimly saw the old man who must have been the village chief stand up in the middle of the circle. He held the charred piece of paper in his hands, and was yelling something in a squeaky high-pitched voice.
The brush still burned, sending runners of sparks along the blackened stalks. Here and there the ground itself was burning. Trees had keeled over and collapsed into themselves like cigarette ash. A cloud of smoke blocked the narrow entrance of the cave, and as Poole ran toward it, he heard enraged painful screams coming from behind the unmoving cloud.
A second later Victor Spitalny came windmilling through the smoke. His face was bright red and he was screaming as if he had been tortured. Spitalny moved in an irregular series of agitated, aimless hops and jumps, like a man being given a series of powerful electrical shocks. He must have been hit somewhere, but there was no blood on him. He was uttering a series of high-pitched syllables which at length resolved themselves into “Kill ’em! Kill ’em!” Then he lost his footing and fell into the ash near the mouth of the cave. He began to thrash around, incapable of controlling himself enough to get back on his feet. Poole pulled his groundcloth out of his pack, flipped it open, and bent over Spitalny to roll him up inside it. Raised red welts covered Spitalny’s face and neck. His eyes were swollen shut.
“Wasps!” Spitalny shrieked. “All over me!”
Through the smudges where the hootches had been, Poole could see all the villagers standing up, straining to look toward them.
He yelled a question about the lieutenant and Dengler, but Spitalny kept shaking and jerking. Spanky Burrage had knelt down and was pounding the groundcloth all over Spitalny’s chest, flipped him over and began beating on his back. Then he burst out laughing. “Fool, there ain’t nothin’ in there but you.”
“Look inside here and count all the dead wasps,” Spitalny said.
Poole stood up just as Dengler emerged through the cave’s narrow opening. He looked whiter than ever, almost grey under the dirt. His rifle dangled from his right hand, and his eyes seemed blurry with shock or exhaustion.
“Koko,” Dengler said, and half a dozen men looked at each other.
“What?” Poole asked. “What happened?”
“Nothing.”
“You waste Elvis?” asked Spanky Burrage.
“Nothing happened,” Dengler said. He took a few steps, stirring up sparks and ashes with his boots, and looked over the expanse of destroyed earth to the old people, all of them now standing in the center of what had been their village and looking straight back at him.
Poole heard the villagers shouting something, but it took him a moment to separate the voices enough to make out the words. What they were yelling was “Numbah ten!”
“Who was firing?”
“The good guys,” Dengler said, giving a faint smile to the reeking, smoke-filled air between himself and the village.
“Is the lieutenant okay?” Poole wondered what he really hoped the answer to that question would be.
Dengler shrugged.
“You numbah ten!” came from the villagers, repeated in a ragged random chaos of high-pitched voices.
Poole realized that at some point he would no longer be able to delay going into that opening in the rock. He would go in and a child would stand before him holding out its hand in the darkness.
“You know something?” Dengler spoke in a monotone. “I was right.”
“You were right about what?”
“I was right about God.”
Now Spitalny stood in the sunlight with his shirt off, breathing hard. Red swellings puffed out his shoulders, arms, and back, and his face was a collection of large, red, angry-looking lumps. He looked like a plateful of yams. Norm Peters had begun to spread a greasy white ointment over Spitalny’s shoulders.
Poole turned away from Burrage and walked across the smoking ground toward the medic and Spitalny. After a second Burrage came too, as unwilling as Poole to go into the cave.
Poole had taken only a few steps when he heard the approaching helicopter and looked up toward a gnat-sized black dot in the sky. Wrong, he thought, go away, go back.
4
“I can’t figure this out,” Peters was saying. “Will you look at this? It doesn’t make sense, not to me it doesn’t.”
“Is Dengler out?” Spitalny asked.
Poole nodded. “What doesn’t make sense?” But as soon as he had asked the question, he saw. Spitalny’s narrow sharp-featured face had begun to reappear as the swellings sank down into it. His eyes were visible now, and his forehead no longer bulged out in a series of lumpy corrugations but ascended almost smoothly through eruptions like undeclared pimples to his black widow’s peak.
“These aren’t wasp stings,” Peters said. “They’re hives.”
“Fuck you, they ain’t wasp stings,” said Spitalny. “The lieutenant ain’t outa there yet. You better wrap yourself up in something and drag him out.”
“Even if they were wasp stings, the stuff I’m putting on wouldn’t reduce the swelling, it’d just reduce the pain. You see how these things are going down?”
“Suck my dick,” Spitalny said. He held out his skinny arms and examined them—the swellings had shrunk to the size and shape of leeches.
“You tell me,” Poole said. The helicopter had grown in the distance to the size of a housefly.
“Wasps,” Spitalny insisted. “Man, I’ll bet the Lost Boss is in there, down and out, man. We gonna get us a new lieutenant.”
He looked at Poole with the sort of expression a dog wears when you are made to realize that it too can think. “The good part of this is obvious, isn’t it? You can’t court-martial a dead man.”
Poole watched the poisoned red lumps shrink into Spitalny’s filthy sallow skin.
“There’s one way out of this, and you know what it is as much as I do. We put it all on the lieutenant. Which is exactly where it oughta be.”
The helicopter was huge in the sky now, descending toward them through the harsh sunlight. Beneath it the grass flattened out in sealike waves and ripples. Beyond the ruined village, beyond the ditch, lay the meadow where the oxen grazed. Far to the left, the forested hillside they had descended appeared to continue the waves and ripples caused by the helicopter far out beyond the valley.
Then he heard Harry Beevers’ voice, loud and jubilant. “Poole! Underhill! Give me two men!” When he saw that they were gaping at him, he grinned. “Jackpot!”
He came striding toward them. The man was up, Poole saw. The nervous, jittery energy was all octane now. He was like a man who does not know that the reason he feels so good is that he’s drunk. Sweat flew off his face and his eyes were liquid. “Where are my two men?”
Poole motioned to Burrage and Pumo, who began to move toward the cave.
“I want everything out of that cave, and I want it piled up right out here where everybody can see it. Troops, we’re going to make the six o’clock news.”
Troops? Beevers had never seemed more like an alien visitor who had learned earthling “ways” from television programs.
“You numbah ten!” an old woman shouted at them.
“Number ten on your programs, number one in your hearts,” Lieutenant Beevers said to Poole, then turned away to greet the reporters running hunched over through the grass.
5
A
nd everything else flowed from what came out of Harry Beevers’ mouth. Newsweek and Time and stories in hundreds of daily newspapers, a blip passing over the screen of what is seen and read and talked about. Then only a cooling memory, stored in old photographs, of a mountain of rice and a tall pile of Russian weapons which had been carried out of a cave by Spanky Burrage and Tina Pumo and the other members of the platoon. Ia Thuc was a VC village, and everybody in it wanted to kill American soldiers. But there were no photographs of the bodies of thirty children because the only bodies found at Ia Thuc were those that had been incinerated in a ditch—three children, two males and a female, roughly thirteen years of age—and that of a single small boy of perhaps seven, also incinerated. Later the body of a young woman was found on the hillside.
After the reporters left, the old people were relocated to a refugee camp at An Lo. The Tin Man and those above him described this action as “penalizing the insurgents and depriving the VC of a recruiting base.” The crops were poisoned and the people, Buddhists, taken from their family burial plots. They had seen this coming from the moment their houses were burned—maybe from the moment Beevers had killed the sow. They disappeared into An Lo, fifteen old people among thousand of refugees.
When Poole and Tim Underhill had gone deep into the cave a cloud of transparent moths had filled the air around them, buffeting against them, flattening out over their mouths and eyes, then beating off again—Poole waved his hands before his face and moved as quickly as he could, Underhill behind him, into another section of the cave, which the moths did not enter. This was the chamber where the firing had taken place. The blood was already disappearing into the bullet-pocked wall the way Spitalny’s skin eruptions, his yams, leeches, eggs, and almonds had faded back into his body. The cave folded and unfolded, branching apart like a maze. Farther on they found another large store of rice, farther on a little wooden desk and chair—the desk looked as though it had been taken from one of Poole’s own grade school classrooms in Greenwich, Connecticut. It began to seem hopeless, they would never find the end of it: it seemed to have no end at all, but to twist back around in on itself.
They came out again past the chamber where the empty metal casings lay like thrown coins, and Underhill inhaled deeply and shook his head. Poole smelled it too. The chamber was filled with a complex odor compounded of terror, blood, gunpowder, and some other odor Poole could identify only in negatives. It was not piss, it was not shit, it was not sweat or rot or fungus or even the reeking dew all animals exude when they are frightened unto death, but something beneath all these. The indefinable odor in the stone chamber stank of pain to him. It stank like the place where Injun Joe had made Tom Sawyer watch him rape Becky Thatcher before he killed them both.
He and Underhill finally came back out into the main part of the cave. M.O. Dengler was saying something to Spitalny as he carried a case of Russian rifles out through the opening.
“A man of sorrow and acquainted with grief,” Spitalny replied, or more likely, repeated. “A man of sorrow and acquainted with grief, a man of sorrow and acquainted with dickheads, Jesus Christ.”
“Calm down, Vic,” Dengler said. “Whatever it was, it was a long time ago.” Then he wobbled, and his rear end dropped as if a strong hand had suddenly pushed his head down into his neck. Dengler’s legs folded sideways, and the case of rifles landed with a loud thud, Dengler nearly soundlessly. Spitalny heard the crash as the box of rifles landed, turned around, looked down, and continued carrying his box of rifles toward the stack.
“There are no children!” Beevers was yelling. “Not in war! No children!” Well, he was right: there were no children. For the first but not the last time, Poole wondered if the villagers from An Lac had taken more children out through another entrance.
Dengler groaned as Peters unwrapped the final length of gauze. Everybody backed up for a second. Compact as a puff of cigarette smoke, a deep brown odor floated up from the exposed wound.
“You’re out of here for a couple of days,” Peters said.
“Where’d the lieutenant go?” Dengler’s eyes moved almost fearfully from side to side while Peters rewrapped his arm.
“Did you see the bats flying out of his mouth?” Dengler asked.
“I gave him something a little extra,” Peters said. “Tide him over.”
Into the darkness, which tides us over.
1
Groggy with cognac and too little sleep, they landed in San Francisco at some hour that seemed like four or five in the morning but was actually noon. In a vast hall hundreds of passengers milled around a luggage carousel and watched their bags thump and slide down a metal ramp onto a moving belt. His beard trimmed and his thinning hair cut short, Tim Underhill looked gaunt and tired. His shoulders were as stooped as an old scholar’s, and now his questing face was also a scholar’s. Poole wondered if it had been a mistake to bring him back with them.
As they moved toward Customs and Immigration with their bags, a uniformed man appeared among them, awarding instant customs clearance to a few of the passengers. The people he selected to receive this convenience were invariably middle-aged males who looked like corporate executives. Koko had been here, Poole thought while the official’s eye rested upon him and moved on. Koko stood on this spot and saw everything I am seeing. He left a flight from Bangkok or Singapore and changed to a New York flight where he met a stewardess named Lisa Mayo and an unpleasant young millionaire. He talked to the unpleasant young man on the flight, and shortly after they landed at JFK airport, he killed him. I bet he did, I bet he did, I bet, I bet—
He stood right where I’m standing, Poole thought. His skin shivered.
Harry Beevers bounced up off his seat as soon as the others found their departure gate in the United terminal. He stepped over the semicircle of suitbags and carry-on luggage arranged before him and began tacking toward them through the rows of seats.
They met before the desk, and Beevers silently braced Poole at arm’s length, then embraced him, enclosing him in the odors of alcohol, cologne, and airline soap. Poole supposed he was being commended for actions in the field.
Beevers melodramatically dropped his hands from Michael’s arms and turned to Conor. But before Beevers could give the French Foreign Legion seal of approval to him too, Conor stuck out his hand. Beevers gave in and shook it. Finally he turned to Tim Underhill. “So this is you,” he said.
Underhill almost laughed out loud. “Disappointed?”
Poole had wondered all during their flight how Beevers would handle Underhill’s arrival among them as an innocent man. There was the small possibility that he would do something really nutty, such as put handcuffs on him and make a citizen’s arrest. Harry Beevers’ fantasies died hard, and Poole did not expect him to give up this one, which had been the foundation of many others, without being paid heavily for its loss.
But the good grace, and even the good sense of his response surprised Poole. “Not if you’re going to help us, I’m not.”
“I want to stop him too, Harry. Of course I’ll help you, however I can.”
“Are you clean?” Beevers asked.
“I’n not doing too bad,” Underhill said.
“Okay. But there’s one more thing. I want your agreement that you won’t use any of this Koko material in a work of nonfiction. You can write all the fiction you want—I don’t care about that. But I have to have the nonfiction rights to this.”
“Sure,” Underhill said. “I couldn’t write nonfiction if I tried. And I won’t sue you if you won’t sue me.”
“We can work together,” Beevers declared. He dragged Underhill too in for a hug and said he was on the team. “Let’s make some serious money, okay?”
* * *
Michael sat next to Beevers on the flight to New York. Conor was in the window seat, and Tim Underhill sat just ahead of Michael. For a long time Beevers told improbable stories about his adventures in Taipei—stories about drinking snake’s blood and having incredibl
e sex with beautiful whores, actresses, and models. Then he leaned toward Michael and whispered. “We have to be careful with this guy, Michael. We can’t trust him, that’s the bottom line. Why do you think I’m inviting him to stay with me? I’ll be able to keep my eye on him.”
Poole nodded wearily.
In a voice loud enough to be overheard, Beevers said, “I want you guys to think about something. We are going to be seeing the police at some point after we get back, and that gives us a problem. How much do we tell them?”
Underhill twisted around in his seat to look back with an interested, quizzical expression.
“I think we should consider holding to a certain confidentiality here,” Beevers said. “We started off on this thing by wanting to find Koko ourselves, and that’s how we want to finish up. We ought to stay a step ahead of the police all the way.”
“Okay, I guess,” Conor said.
“I hope I have the agreement of the rest of you on this point.”
“We’ll see,” Poole said.
“I don’t suppose we’re exactly talking about obstruction of justice,” Underhill said.
“I don’t care what you call it,” Beevers said. “All I’m saying is that we hold back on one or two details. Which is what the police do all the time as a matter of course. We hold back a little. And when we come up with a course of action, we keep it to ourselves.”
“Course of action?” Conor asked. “What can we do?”
Beevers asked them to consider a few possibilities. “For instance, we have two bits of information the police do not have. We know that Koko is Victor Spitalny, and we know that a man named Tim Underhill is in New York—or soon will be—and not back in Bangkok.”
“You don’t want to tell the cops that we’re looking for Spitalny?” Conor asked.
“We can play a little dumb. They can find out who is missing and who isn’t.” He gave Michael a superior little smile. “It is the other bit of information that I see being most useful to us. Spitalny used this man’s name”—he pointed at Underhill—“didn’t he? To get the reporters to come to him? I think he did, based on what we found out at Goodwood Park. So I say let’s turn the tables on him.”
