Koko brt-1

by Peter Straub

  “You’re the one who called? Dr. Poole?”

  “Yes, and—”

  “Who’s that one? You didn’t tell me about that one.”

  “Maggie Lah. She is a close friend of ours.”

  The odd pale dog’s eyes inspected him. Poole had become aware of a close, dank, musty smell as soon as the door closed. Mrs. Dengler’s nose was upturned and very broad, with three deep creases across its top just beneath the bridge of the old-fashioned glasses. She had virtually no lips, and her neck was very thick. Her shoulders too were thick, sturdy, and bent forward in a permanent stoop.

  “I’m just an old woman who lives alone, that’s all I am. Now, now. Yes. Come along.” With little phrases she motioned them toward a coat rack and stood rubbing her hands over her wide upper arms. In the darkness of the hallway Mrs. Dengler’s large square face seemed to shine, as if it drew all the light in the house to it.

  Helga Dengler’s pale eyes moved from Poole to Maggie to Underhill and back to Maggie. There was a sense of heavy shapelessness about her, as if she were far heavier than she looked. “So,” she said. A staircase, in the darkness no more than an impression of a wooden handrail and newel posts, rose into the gloom at her back. The floor was slightly gritty underfoot. Dim light came through a half-open door down the hall.

  “You’re very kind to have invited us, Mrs. Dengler,” Poole said, and Maggie and Tim Underhill said similar things that tangled together in the air and then broke off.

  As if their words had reached her after a delay, for a moment she merely gleamed at them. Then: “Well, the Bible tells us to be kind, doesn’t it? You men knew my son?”

  “He was a wonderful person,” Poole said.

  “We loved your son,” Underhill said at the same moment, and their sentences also tangled together.

  “Well,” she said. Poole thought that he could look all the way through her eyes and see nothing but the clear blue color of blue jeans washed a thousand times. Then he thought that their queer awkwardness was forced on them by her: that she had wished it upon them.

  “Manny tried to be a good boy,” she said. “He had to be trained to it, like all boys.”

  Again Poole had the sense of a missed beat, of a second that fell either into Helga Dengler or out of the world altogether.

  “You’ll want to sit down,” she said. “I guess the living room is where you’ll want to go. This way. I’m busy, you see. An old woman who lives alone has to keep herself busy.”

  “Have we interrupted something?” Poole asked. She smiled her hard twitch of a smile and motioned for them to follow her down the hall and through the door.

  One low-wattage bulb burned beneath an ornate lampshade. The single bar of an electrical heater glowed red in the corner of the crowded room. Here the musty odor was not so noticeable. The furniture seemed to glow and ripple. Purple stained-glass tiger’s eyes shone down from little shelves and from a table beside a couch of worn plush. “You can all sit there, it used to be my mother’s.” The rippling glow was reflected light streaking across stiff clear plastic covers which creaked when they sat down.

  Poole looked sideways at the tiger’s eyes on the round table and saw that they were marbles, cracked on the inside in such a way that they caught the yellow light. There were dozens of them fixed in an arrangement on a piece of black cloth.

  “That’s my work,” the woman said. She was standing in the center of the room. On the wall behind her was a framed photograph of a uniformed man who in the general darkness resembled a Boy Scout leader. Other pictures, of puppies tumbled together and kittens entangled in yarn, had been placed in random positions on the walls.

  “You can have your opinion, and I’ll have mine,” Mrs. Dengler said. She took a half-step forward, and her eyes seemed to swell behind the round lenses. “Everybody’s entitled to their opinion, that’s what we told them over and over again.”

  “Excuse me?” Michael said. Underhill was smiling either at Mrs. Dengler or at the pictures only half-visible behind her. “You said … your work?”

  She visibly relaxed, and stepped backwards again. “My grape clusters. You were looking.”

  “Oh,” Poole said. That was what they were. The purple marbles, he saw, had been glued to the black fabric in the shape of a cluster of grapes. “Very nice.”

  “Everybody always thought so. When my husband had his church, some of the congregation used to buy my grape clusters. Everybody always said they were beautiful. The way they catch the light.”

  “Beautiful,” Poole said.

  “How do you make them?” Maggie asked.

  This time her smile seemed genuine, almost delicate, as if she knew she took an immodest amount of pride in her grape clusters. “You could do it yourself,” she said, and finally sat down on a footstool. “It’s in a pan. I always use Wesson oil. You use butter, it spatters. And it burns. My husband would use butter for everything, but he had the feeling for meat, you see. You use that Wesson oil, little girl, and you’ll always get your marbles to crack in the right way. That’s what nobody understands—especially in these times. You must do things right.”

  “So you fry the marbles,” Maggie said.

  “Well … yes. You use your pan and your Wesson oil. And you use low heat. That way they crack all the same way. That’s the good part of it. They all turn out just right. Then you turn them out of the pan and run cold water over them for a second or two, that seems to set them somehow, and after they cool down you glue them to your form. A dot of glue, that’s it. And then you’ve got your cluster, a beautiful thing for all eternity.” She beamed at Maggie, all the light concentrated in the heavy, thick center of her face. “For … all … eternity. Like the Word of God. Each one takes twenty-four marbles. To come out exactly right and lifelike too. Well. Better than lifelike, in some ways.”

  “Being all alike,” Maggie said.

  “All just alike. That’s the beauty part. With boys, you know, you can just try and try. You can do what you will, but they will resist.” Her face closed up for a moment, and the center of her face seemed to dim. “Nothing in life comes out the way you expect, not even for Christians. You’re a Christian, aren’t you, little girl?”

  Maggie blinked and said oh yes, of course.

  “These men pretend, but they haven’t fooled me. I can smell the beer on them. A Christian man doesn’t drink beer. My Karl never touched a drop of liquor, and my Manny never did either. At least not until he got away, into the service.” She glared at Poole as if she held him personally responsible for her son’s lapses. “And never mixed with bad women, either. We beat that into him. He was a good boy, as good as we could make him. And considering where and what he came from.” Another sullen look at Poole, as if he knew all about that. “We got that boy to work, and work he did until the day the army took him. School is school, we said, but your work is your life. Butcher-work came from God, but man made schoolwork and reading any book but one.”

  “Was he happy as a child?” Poole asked.

  “The Devil worries about happiness,” she said, and the weird pale light went on in her face and eyes again. “Do you think Karl thought about such as that? Do you think I did? Those are the questions the other ones asked. Now you tell me something, Dr. Poole, and I’ll rely on you to tell me the truth. Did that boy drink liquor in the service over there? And did he waste himself with women? Because in your answer I’ll know what sort of man he was, and what sort you are too. The bad marbles crack all wrong, oh yes. The bad marble falls to pieces in the fire. The mother was one of those. Tell me—answer my question, or you can leave this house. I let you in, you’re not a policeman or a judge. My opinions are as good as yours, in case they’re not a lot better.”

  “Of course,” Poole said. “No, I don’t think I can remember your son ever taking a drink. And he remained … what you would call pure.”

  “Well. Yes. Yes, he did. This one thing I know. Manny stayed pure. What I would call pure,” she added, wit
h a blast of ice straight from her eyes into Poole’s heart.

  Poole wondered how she could have known that before he told her, and if she had known why she had asked. “We’d like to tell you some things about your son,” he said, and his words sounded clumsy and ill-chosen.

  “Go on,” the woman said, and again used her peculiar psychic strength to alter both herself and the atmosphere in the room. She seemed to sigh inaudibly: both her thick body and the air grew heavier, as if filled up with dull unexpectant waiting. “You want to tell your story, so tell it.”

  “Did we interrupt your work, Mrs. Dengler?” Maggie asked.

  A gleam of satisfaction. “I turned off my stove. It can wait. You people are here. You know what I think? We trained him more than most would, and some didn’t care for what we did. You can’t put your faith in what others say. Muffin Street is a world like many others. Muffin Street is real. You go ahead now.”

  “Mrs. Dengler,” Tim said, “your son was a wonderful human being. He was a hero under fire, and more than that, he was compassionate and inventive—”

  “You think backwards,” she broke in. “Oh, my. Backwards. Inventive? You mean he made things up. Isn’t that part of the original trouble? Would there have been a trial, if he hadn’t made things up?”

  “I would never defend his being court-martialed,” Tim said, “but I don’t think you can blame it on him, either.”

  “Imagination has to be stopped. You’re talking about imagination. You have to put an end to that. That’s one thing I know. And Karl knew it, up until the day he passed away.” She turned almost in agitation to look at the rows of identical grape clusters, each grape with its identical flare of light within. “Well. Go on. You want to. You came all the way to do it.”

  Underhill talked about Dragon Valley, and the stories that had eased George Spitalny at first left her unmoved, then seemed to distress her. Pink crept into the whiteness of her face: her eyes zapped into Poole’s, and he saw that it was not distress that made her flush, but anger.

  So much for the gods of storytelling, he thought.

  “Manny’s behavior was fantastic, and he mocked his officer. Behavior should never be fantastic, and he should have respected the officer.”

  “The whole situation was a little fantastic,” Underhill said.

  “That is what people say when they try to excuse themselves. Wherever the boy was, he should have acted as if he were on Muffin Street. Pride is a sin. We would have punished him.”

  Poole could feel Tim’s anger and sorrow even through Maggie Lah, who sat between them.

  “Mrs. Dengler,” Maggie said, “a moment ago you said that Manny was a good boy, considering where he came from.”

  The old woman lifted her head like an animal sniffing the wind. Unmistakable pleasure shone through her round eyeglasses. “Little girls can listen, can’t they?”

  “You didn’t mean Muffin Street, did you?”

  “Manny didn’t come from Muffin Street. So.”

  Maggie waited for what was to come next, and Poole wondered what it would be. Mars? Russia? Heaven?

  “Manny came from the gutter,” Mrs. Dengler said. “We took that boy out of the gutter and we gave him a home. We gave him our name. We gave him our religion. We fed him and we clothed him. Does that sound like the work of bad people? Do you think bad people would have done that for an abandoned little boy?”

  “You adopted him?”

  Underhill was leaning backwards against the stiff plastic, staring intently at Helga Dengler.

  “We adopted that poor abandoned child and we gave him new life. Do you think his mother could have had my coloring? Are you such fools? Karl was blond too, before he went grey. Karl was an angel of God, with his yellow hair and his flowing beard! Yes! I will show you.”

  She all but hopped to her feet, glowered down at them with her X-ray eyes, and left the room. It was like a grotesque parody of their evening with the Spitalnys. “Did he ever say anything to you about being adopted?” Poole asked.

  Underhill shook his head.

  “Manuel Orosco Dengler,” Maggie said. “You must have known something was going on.”

  “We never called him that,” Poole said.

  Mrs. Dengler opened the door, admitting a whiff of the odor of damp wood along with herself. She was clutching an old photograph album made of pressed cardboard treated to resemble leather. The corners and edges had frayed, showing the blunted grey edges of the layers of compressed paper. She came forward eagerly, open-mouthed, like a wronged defendant to the judge. “Now you see my Karl,” she said, opening the album to an early page and turning it around to face them.

  The photograph took up nearly the entire page. It might have been taken a hundred years earlier. A tall man with lank pale hair that hung past his ears and a pale unruly beard glared at the camera. He was thin but broad-shouldered and wore a dark suit that hung on him like a sack. He looked driven, haunted, intense. The nature of this man’s religion rose off the photograph like steam. Where his wife’s eyes looked through you to another world, dismissing everything between herself and it, his looked straight into hell and condemned you to it.

  “Karl was a man of God,” Helga said. “You can see that plainly. He was chosen. My Karl was not a lazy man. You can see that too. He was not soft. He never shirked his duty, not even when his duty was to stand on a street corner in below zero weather. The News would not wait for fine weather, and it needed a hard, dedicated man to tell it, and that was my Karl. So we needed help. Someday we would be old. But we didn’t know what was going to happen to us!” She was panting, and her eyes bulged behind the round glasses. Again Poole felt that her body was gathering density, pulling into it all the air in the room and along with it all that ever was or ever would be right or moral, leaving them forever in the wrong.

  “Who were his parents?” Poole heard Underhill ask, and knew that she would misunderstand.

  “Fine people. Who would have had such a son? Strong people. Karl’s father was also a butcher, he taught him the trade, and Karl taught Manny the trade so that Manny could work for us while we did the Lord’s own work. We raised him from the gutter and gave him eternal life, so. He was to work for us and provide for our old age.”

  “I see,” said Underhill, bending forward slightly to glance at Michael. “We’d also like to know something about your son’s parents.”

  Mrs. Dengler folded the photograph album shut and laid it across her lap. Some of the musty smell had permeated the cardboard, and for a moment the odor eddied about them.

  “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 plant
ed 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.”