Koko (12 page)

“Here’s some guy, I don’t know who,” Daisy said. Once Conor saw the face, he was barely
able to hear the lawyer’s voice. “Big so-and-so, wasn’t he? I can guess what he was
up to with that little girl.”

It was an honest mistake. His new wife had jumped-started Daisy’s gonads—why else
was he coming home at four-thirty in the afternoon?

Tim Underhill, bandanna around his neck, was the big soldier in the photograph. And
the “girl” was one of his
flowers
—a young man so feminine he might have been an actual girl. Smiling at the photographer,
they stood on a narrow street crammed with jeeps and rickshaws in what must have been
Da Nang or Hue.

“Son?” Daisy was saying. “You okay, son?”

For a second Conor wondered if Daisy would give him Underhill’s picture.

“You look a little white, son,” Daisy said.

“Don’t worry,” Conor said. “I’m fine.”

He merely scanned the rest of the photographs.

“The truth is in the pudding,” he said. “You can’t forget this kind of shit.”

Then Ben Roehm decided he needed another new man to do the taping in the kitchen and
hired Victor Spitalny.

Conor had been a few minutes late to work. When he came into the ruined kitchen a
stranger with a long streaky-blond pony-tail was slouching against the skeletal framing
of the new partition. The new man wore a raveled turtleneck under a plaid shirt. A
worn toolbelt hung beneath his beerbelly. There was a new scab on the bridge of his
nose, old scabs the color of overdone toast on the knuckles of his left hand. Red
lines threaded the whites of his eyes. Conor’s memory released a bubble filled with
the indelible odor of burning kerosene-soaked shit. Vietnam, a ground-pounder.

Ben Roehm and the other carpenters and painters in the crew sat or sprawled on the
floor, drinking morning coffee from their thermoses. “Conor, meet Tom Woyzak, your
new taping partner,” Ben said. Woyzak stared at Conor’s outstretched hand for a few
beats before grudgingly shaking it.

Drink it down
, Conor remembered,
boo-koo good for your insides.

All morning they silently taped sheetrock on opposite sides of the kitchen.

After Mrs. Daisy had come and gone with a pot of fresh coffee at eleven, Woyzak growled,
“See how she came on to me? Before this job is over I’ll be up in the bitch’s bedroom,
nailing her to the floor.”

“Sure, sure,” Conor said, laughing.

Woyzak was instantly across the kitchen, leaving a steaming trail of coffee and a
spinning cup on the floor. His teeth showed. He pushed his face up to Conor’s. “Don’t
get in my way, faggot, or I’ll waste you.”

“Back off,” Conor said. He shoved him away. Conor was set to move this lunatic off-center
with a head fake, step into him and mash his adam’s apple with a left, but Woyzak
dusted his shoulders as though Conor’s touch had dirtied him and backed away.

At the end of the day Woyzak dropped his toolbelt in a corner of the kitchen and silently
watched Conor pack his tools away for the night.

“Ain’t you a neat little fucker,” he said.

Conor slammed his toolbox shut. “Do you have many friends, Woyzak?”

“Do you think these people are going to adopt you? These people are not going to adopt
you.”

“Forget it.” Conor stood up.

“So you were over there too?” Woyzak asked in a voice that put as little curiosity
as possible into the question.

“Yeah.”

“Clerk-typist?”

In a rage, Conor shook his head and turned away.

“What outfit were you in?”

“Ninth Battalion, Twenty-Fourth Infantry.”

Woyzak’s laugh sounded like wind blowing over loose gravel. Conor kept on walking
until he was safely out of the house.

He sat straddling his motorcycle for a long time, looking down at the dark grey stones
of the drive, deliberately not thinking. The sky and the air were as dark as the gravel.
Cold wind blew against his face. He could feel sharp individual stones digging into
the soles of his boots.

For a moment Conor was certain that he was going to fire up his Harley and
go
, just keep moving in a blur of speed and distance until he had flown without stopping
across hundreds of miles. Speed and travel gave him a pleasant, light, kind of empty
feeling. Conor saw highways rolling out before him, the neon signs in front of motels,
hamburgers sizzling on the griddles of roadside diners.

Perched on his bike in the cold air, he heard doors slamming inside the house. Ben
Roehm’s big baritone rang out.

He wished that Mike Poole would call him up and say,
We’re on the way, babyface, pack your bags and meet us at the airport.

Ben Roehm opened the door and fixed Conor with his eyes. He stepped outside and pulled
on his heavy fleece-lined denim coat. “See you tomorrow?”

“I got nowhere else to go,” Conor said.

Ben Roehm nodded. Conor kicked his Harley into noisy life and rode off as the rest
of the crew came through the door.

For three or four days Woyzak and Conor ignored each other. When Charlie Daisy finally
scented another veteran and appeared with his box of medals and his photo album, Conor
put down his tools and wandered out. He couldn’t bear to hang around while Thomas
Woyzak looked at Underhill’s picture.

The night before what turned out to be his last day, Conor woke up at four from a
nightmare about M.O. Dengler and Tim Underhill. At five he got out of bed. He made
a pot of coffee and drank nearly all of it before he left for work. Pieces of the
dream clung to Conor all morning.

He is cowering in a bunker with Dengler, and they are enduring a firefight. Underhill
must be in a dark portion of the same bunker or in another right beside it, for his
rich voice, sounding a great deal like Ben Roehm’s, carries over most of the noise.

There had been no bunkers in Dragon Valley.

The lieutenant’s corpse sits upright against the far side of the bunker, its legs
splayed out. Blood from a neat slash in the lieutenant’s throat has sheeted down over
his trunk, staining his chest solidly red.

“Dengler!” Conor says in his dream. “Dengler, look at the lieutenant! That asshole
got us into this mess and now he’s dead!”

Another great light burst in the sky, and Conor sees a Koko card protruding from Lieutenant
Beevers’ mouth.

Conor touches Dengler’s shoulder and Dengler’s body rolls over onto his legs and Conor
sees Dengler’s mutilated face and the Koko card in his gaping mouth. He screams in
both the dream and real life and wakes up.

Conor got to work early and waited outside for the others. A
few minutes later Ben Roehm pulled up in his Blazer with the two other members of
the crew who lived up in his part of the state. They were men with babies and rent
to pay, but too young to have been in Vietnam. As he watched them get out of the cab,
Conor realized that he felt surprisingly paternal toward these sturdy young carpenters—they
didn’t have enough experience to know the difference between Ben Roehm and most of
the other contractors around.

“Okay this morning, Red?” Roehm asked.

“Right as the dew, man.”

Woyzak pulled up a moment later in a long car that had been covered with black primer
and stripped of all exterior ornaments, even door handles.

Once they went to work, Conor noticed for the first time that Woyzak, who had covered
twice as much ground as he had, had done his taping as if he were working for a contractor
rushing to finish a crap job on a row of egg-carton houses. Ben Roehm was exacting,
and to satisfy him you had to get your seams flat and smooth. Woyzak’s work looked
as crude as his getaway car. In the tape were lumps and bulges and wrinkles that would
stay there forever, visible even when the walls had been skimmed with plaster and
covered with two coats of paint.

Woyzak saw Conor staring at his work. “Something wrong?”

“Just about all of it’s wrong, man. Did you ever work for Ben before?”

Woyzak put down his tools and stepped toward Conor. “You little red-haired fuck, you
telling me I can’t do my work? You happen to notice I’m twice as good as you are?
I think the only reason you’re still on this job is you went crazy over the old guy’s
pictures. The Old Man wants to keep the civilians happy.”

The Old Man? Conor thought. Civilians? Are we back in base camp? “Hey, his kid took
those pictures, man,” he said.

“A nigger named Cotton took the pictures.”

“Oh, shit.” Conor felt as if he had to sit down, fast.

“Cotton was in little Daisy’s platoon. The kid made some arrangement to get copies
of his pictures—you asshole.”

“I
knew
Cotton,” Conor said. “I was with him when he bought it.”

“
I
don’t care who took the pictures—
I
don’t care if he’s alive or dead or somewhere in between. And I don’t care if everybody
around here thinks you’re some kind of hero, because you’re just a fuckin’ nuisance
in my eyes, man.” Woyzak took another step toward him, and Conor saw the overlapping
fury and misery in
him, laid down so deeply he could not tell them apart. “You hear me? I was in a firefight
for twenty-one days, man, twenty-one days and twenty-one nights.”

“We gotta do something about the cat faces in the tape, that’s all—”

Woyzak wasn’t hearing him any more. His eyes looked amazingly like pinwheels.

“PUSSY!”
he screamed.

“I thought you liked pussy,” Conor said.

“I’m a good taper!” Woyzak shouted.

Ben Roehm stopped everything by slamming his fist against a sheetrock panel. Coffeepot
in her hand, Mrs. Daisy hovered behind the contractor.

Woyzak smiled weakly at her.

“That’s enough,” Roehm said.

“I can’t work with this asshole,” Woyzak said, literally throwing his hands up in
the air.

“This guy was edging me on,” Conor protested.

“Charlie would have a fit if he heard bad language in the house,” Mrs. Daisy said
nervously. “He might not look it, but he’s very old-fashioned.”

“Who’s the taper, anyhow?” Woyzak bent down and picked up his blade and brush. His
eyes looked normal again. “I only want to do my job.”

“But look how he’s doing it, man!”

Ben Roehm turned a solemn face to Conor and told him they had to talk.

He led Conor down the hall to the demolished morning room. Behind his back, Conor
heard Woyzak purr something insinuating to Mrs. Daisy, who giggled.

In the morning room, Ben stepped over the holes in the floor and slumped back against
a bare wall. “That boy is my niece Ellen’s husband. He had a lot of bad experiences
overseas, and I’m trying to help him out. You don’t have to tell me he tapes like
a sailor on a three-day drunk—I’m doing what I can for him.” He looked at Conor, but
could not meet his eyes for long. “I wish I could say something else, Red, but I can’t.
You’re a good little worker.”

“I suppose I was on a picnic the whole time I was in Nam.” Conor shook his head and
clamped his mouth shut.

“I’ll give you a couple extra days’ pay. There’ll be another job, come this summer.”

Summer was a long time coming, but Conor said, “Don’t
worry about me, I got something else lined up. I’m gonna take a trip.”

Roehm awkwardly waved him away. “Stay out of the bars.”

When Conor got back to Water Street in South Norwalk, he realized that he could remember
nothing that had happened since he had left Ben Roehm. It was as though he had fallen
asleep when he mounted the Harley and awakened when he switched it off in front of
his apartment building. He felt tired, empty, depressed. Conor didn’t know how he
had avoided an accident, driving all the way home in a trance. He didn’t know why
he was still alive.

He checked his mailbox out of habit. Among the usual junk mail addressed to “Resident”
and appeals from Connecticut politicians was a long, white, hand-addressed envelope
bearing a New York postmark.

Conor took his mail upstairs, threw the junk into the wastebasket, and took a beer
out of his refrigerator. When he looked into the mirror over the kitchen sink, he
saw lines in his forehead and pouches under his eyes. He looked sick—middle-aged and
sick. Conor turned on the television, dropped his coat on his only chair, and flopped
onto the bed. He tore open the white envelope, having delayed this action as long
as possible. Then he peered into the envelope. It contained a long blue rectangle
of paper. Conor pulled the check from the envelope and examined it. After a moment
of confusion and disbelief, he reread the writing on the face of the check. It was
made out for two thousand dollars, payable to Conor Linklater, and had been signed
by Harold J. Beevers. Conor picked the envelope up off his chest, looked inside it
again, and found a note:
All systems go! I’ll be in touch about the flight. Regards, Harry (Beans!)

After Conor had gazed at the check for a long, long time, he replaced both it and
the note in the envelope and tried to figure out somewhere safe to put it. If he put
the envelope on the chair he might sit on it, and if he put it on the bed, he might
bundle it
up with the sheets when he went to the laundromat. He worried that if he put it on
top of the TV he might get drunk and mistake it for garbage. Eventually Conor decided
on the refrigerator. He got out of bed, bent to open the refrigerator door, and carefully
placed the envelope on the empty shelf, directly beneath a six-pack of Molson’s Ale.

He splashed water on his face, flattened his hair across his skull with his brush,
and changed into the black denim and corduroy clothing he had worn to Washington.

Conor walked to Donovan’s and drank four boilermakers before anyone else came in.
He didn’t know if he was happier over getting the traveling money than miserable about
losing his job, or more miserable about losing his job because of that asshole Woyzak
than happy about the money. He decided after a while that he was more happy than miserable,
which called for another drink.