Koko (15 page)

Fifteen minutes later the girl was squeezing herself up against him in the back seat
of a taxi. “Bite my ear,” she said.

“Here?”

She tilted her head toward him. Pumo put one arm around her shoulder and took her
earlobe between his teeth. Fine black stubble covered the side of her head.

“Harder.”

She squirmed when he bit down on the gristly lobe.

“You didn’t tell me your name,” he said.

She slid her hand over his crotch. Her breasts nuzzled his upper arm. He felt pleasantly
engulfed. “My friends call me Dracula,” she said. “But not because I suck blood.”

She wouldn’t let him turn on the lights in his loft, and he groped his way to the
bedroom in the dark. Giggling, she pushed him down on the bed. “Just lie there,” she
said, and undid his belt, got rid of his boots, and pulled down his trousers. He got
out of the chain-mail jacket and wrenched off his tie. “Pretty Tina,” Dracula said.
She bent over and licked his erect cock. “I always feel like I’m in church when I
do this.”

“Wow,” Tina said. “Where have you been all my life?”

“You don’t want to know where I’ve been.” She lightly scratched his scrotum with a
long fingernail. “Don’t worry, I don’t have any nasty diseases. I practically
live
at the doctor’s office.”

“Why?”

“I guess I just enjoy being a girl.”

Exhausted, dulled by alcohol, Pumo let her proceed. When she sat up, straddling him,
she looked like an Apache warrior with plucked eyebrows. “Do you like Dracula?”

“I think I’ll marry Dracula,” he said.

She unbuttoned the camouflage shirt and tore it off, exposing
firm conical breasts. “Bite me,” she said, pushing them into his face.
“Hard.
Until I tell you to stop.”

He gently bit one of her nipples, and she ground her knuckles into the side of his
head. “Harder.” She dug her nails into his cock. Pumo bit down.

“Harder.”

He increased the pressure.

When he tasted blood, she screamed and moaned and gripped his head in her arms. “Good
good.” Her hand left his head and found his cock again. “Still hard? Good Tina.”

Finally she let him raise his head. A thin line of blood oozed from the bottom of
her breast down her ribcage. “Now little Drac goes back to church.”

Pumo laughed and fell back on the pillow. He wondered if Vinh or Helen had heard her
scream and decided they probably hadn’t—they were two floors below.

After a long delirious time Pumo’s orgasm sent looping ribbons of semen over her cheeks,
into her eyebrows, into the air. She moaned and hitched herself onto his body so that
his arms were pinned beneath her legs and astonished him by rubbing his semen into
her face with both hands.

“I haven’t come like that since I was about twenty,” he said. “But you’re sort of
hurting my arms.”

“Poor baby.” She patted his cheek.

“I’d really appreciate it if you got off my arms,” he said.

She looked down at him triumphantly and hit him hard in the temple.

Pumo struggled to get up, but Dracula struck him again. He found himself unable to
move for a second. She grinned down at him, her teeth and eyes flashing in the murk,
and slammed her fist against the side of his head.

He yelled for help. She struck him again.

“Murder!” he yelled, but no one heard.

Just before the twentieth blow to his temples, Pumo’s eyes cleared and he saw Dracula
peering impersonally down at him, her mouth pursed and her lipstick smeared.

Pumo came to in darkness, he knew not how much later. His lips throbbed and felt the
size of steaks. He tasted blood. His whole
body ached, the pain radiating out from the twin centers of his head and groin. In
sudden panic, he put his hand on his penis, and found it intact. His eyes opened.
He held up his hands before his face—they were dark with blood.

Pumo lifted his head to look down his body, and a white-hot band of pain jumped from
temple to temple. He fell back on the wet pillow and breathed heavily. Then he lifted
his head more cautiously. He was very cold. He saw his naked body sprawled on dark
wet sheets. Working its way from ache to ache, a thin hot wire of agony snaked through
the middle of his head. Now his lips felt like rough red bricks. He touched his face
with wet fingers.

He considered getting out of bed. Then he wondered what time it was. Pumo raised his
right arm and looked at his wrist, which no longer wore a watch.

He turned his head sideways. The radio with its digital clock was gone from the bedside
table.

He slid himself off the side of the bed, finding the floor first with one foot, then
with both his knees. His chest slid across the sheets, and he swallowed a bitter mouthful
of vomit. When he stood up, his head swam and his vision darkened. He propped himself
up on the headboard with aching arms. A cut on the side of his head beat and beat.

Clutching his head, Pumo slowly made his way into the bathroom. Without turning on
the light, he bathed his face in cold water before daring to look at himself in the
mirror. A grotesque purple mask, the face of the Elephant Man, stared back at him.
His stomach flipped over, and he threw up into the sink and passed out again before
he hit the floor.

“Yes, I’ve been lying low, and no, I haven’t changed my mind about going,” Pumo said.
He was talking on the telephone to Michael Poole. “You should see me, or rather you
shouldn’t. I’m hideous. I stay inside most of the time, because when I go out I frighten
children.”

“Is that some new kind of joke?”

“Don’t I wish. I got beat up by a psychopath. I also got robbed.”

“You mean you got mugged?”

Pumo hesitated. “In a way. I’d explain the circumstances, Mike, but frankly, they’re
too embarrassing.”

“Can’t you even give me a hint?”

“Well, never pick up anybody who calls herself Dracula.” After Michael had laughed
dutifully, Pumo said, “I lost my watch, a clock radio, a brand new pair of lizard-skin
boots from McCreedy and Shreiber, my Walkman, my
Watchman
, a Dunhill lighter that didn’t work anymore, a Giorgio Armani jacket, and all my
credit
cards and about three hundred in cash. And when the asshole took off, he or she left
the downstairs door open and some goddamned bum came in and pissed all over the hallway.”

“How do you feel about that?” Michael groaned. “Jesus, what a stupid question. I mean,
in general how do you feel? I wish you’d called me right away.”

“In general I feel like committing murder, that’s how I feel in general. This thing
shook me up, Mike. The world is full of hurt. I understand that there’s no real safety,
not anywhere. Terrible things can happen in an instant, to anyone. That asshole just
about made me afraid to go outside. But if you’re smart, you
should
be afraid to go outside. Listen—I want you guys to be
careful
when you get over there. Don’t take any risks.”

“Okay,” Michael said.

“The reason I didn’t call you or anybody else is the only good thing that came out
of this whole thing. Maggie showed up. I guess I just missed her at the place where
I encountered Dracula. The bartender told her he saw me leaving with someone else,
so the next day she came around to check up. And found me with my face about twice
its normal size. So she moved back in.”

“As Conor said, there’s a flaw in every ointment. Or something like that.”

“But I did talk to Underhill’s agent. His former agent, I should say.”

“Don’t make me beg.”

“Basically the word is that our boy did go to Singapore, all right, just like he always
said he would. Throng—the agent’s name is Fenwick Throng, believe it or not—didn’t
know if he was still there. They have a funny history. Underhill always had his checks
deposited in a branch bank down in Chinatown. Throng never even knew his address.
He wrote to him in care of a post office box. Every now and then Underhill called
up to rant at him, and a couple of times he fired him. I guess over a period of five
or six years the calls got more and more abusive, more violent. Throng thought that
Tim was usually drunk or stoned or high on something, or all three at once. Then he’d
call back in tears a couple of days later and beg Throng to work for him again. Eventually
it just got too crazy for Throng, and he told Tim he couldn’t work for him anymore.
He thinks that Tim has been agenting his own books ever since.”

“So he’s probably still out there, but we’ll have to find him for ourselves.”

“And he’s nuts. He sounds scary as shit to me, Michael. If I were you, I’d stay home
too.”

“So the agent convinced you that Tim Underhill is probably Koko.”

“I wish I could say he didn’t.”

“I wish you could too.”

“So consider this—is he really worth risking your neck for?” Tina asked.

“I’d sure as hell rather risk my neck for Underhill than for Lyndon Baines Johnson.”

“Well, hang on, because here comes the good part,” Tina said.

“I don’t think adult men actually exist anymore—if they ever did,” Judy said. “They
really are just grown up little boys. It’s demeaning. Michael is a caring, intelligent
person and he works hard and all that, but what he believes in is
ridiculous.
After you reach a certain level, his values are completely childish.”

“At least they’re that mature,” said Pat Caldwell. This conversation too was conducted
over the telephone. “Sometimes I’m afraid that Harry’s are just infantile.”

“Michael still believes in the army. He’d deny that, but it’s the truth. He takes
that boy’s game as the real thing. He loved being part of a group.”

“Harry had the time of his life in Vietnam,” Pat said.

“The point is that Michael is going
back.
He wants to be in the army again. He wants to be part of a unit.”

“I think Harry just wants something to do.”

“Something to do? He could get a job! He could start acting like a lawyer again!”

“Hmm, well, perhaps.”

“Are you aware that Michael wants to sell his share of the practice? That he wants
to move out of Westerholm and work in a slum? He thinks he isn’t
doing
enough. I mean, he has a little tiny point, you have to be a doctor in a place like
this to find out how really political it is, you wouldn’t believe how much infighting
goes on, but that’s
life
, that’s all it is.”

“So he’s using the trip to give himself time to think about it,” Pat suggested.

“He’s using the trip to play army,” Judy said. “Let’s not even mention how he’s guilt-tripping
himself about Ia Thuc.”

“Oh, I think Harry was always proud of Ia Thuc,” Pat said. “Some day, I ought to show
you the letters he wrote me.”

The night before he flew to Singapore, Michael dreamed that he was walking at night
along a mountain trail toward a group of uniformed men sitting around a small fire.
When he gets nearer, he sees that they are ghosts, not men—flames show dimly through
the bodies in front of the fire. The ghosts turn to watch him approach. Their uniforms
are ragged and stiff with dirt. In his dream Michael simply assumes that he had served
with these men. Then one of the ghosts, Melvin O. Elvan, stands and steps forward.
Don’t mess with Underhill
, Elvan says.
The world is full of hurt.

On the same night, Tina Pumo dreams that he is lying on his bed while Maggie Lah paces
around the bedroom. (In real life, Maggie disappeared again as soon as his face had
begun to heal.)
You can’t win a catastrophe
, Maggie says.
You just have to try to keep your head above water. Consider the elephant, his grace
and gravity, his innate nobility. Burn down the restaurant and start over.

The shutters of the bungalow were closed against the heat. A film of condensation
lay over the pink stucco walls, and the air in the room was warm, moist, and pink
dark. There was a strong, dark brown smell of excrement. The man in the first of the
two heavy chairs now and then grunted and stirred, or pushed his arms against the
ropes. The woman did not move, because the woman was dead. Koko was invisible, but
the man followed him with his eyes. When you knew you were going to die, you could
see the invisible.