Koko (18 page)

“A flower!”

“Well, anyway … he made the threat of a two-million-dollar lawsuit sound like a drunken
prank. Things settled down. But as soon as he submitted his next book,
Orchid Blood
, he got crazy again and started threatening lawsuits. Ong Pin wrote some sort of
goofy screed in the kind of English you get in Japanese instruction manuals, you know?
And when the book came out, Underhill mailed a box with dried-up shit in it to the
president of Gladstone, Geoffrey Penmaiden, who I guess everybody knew and revered.
It was like sending a turd to Maxwell Perkins. Then the book came out and flopped.
Just sank out of sight. They haven’t heard a word from him since, and I don’t think
they’re too eager to work with him again.”

“He sent shit in a box to Geoffrey Penmaiden? The most famous publisher in America?”
Beevers asked.

“I think it had more to do with self-hatred than craziness,” Poole said.

“You think they’re not the same?” Beevers reached over and patted Michael’s knee.
“Really.”

When Beevers canted back his seat and closed his eyes, Michael switched on the reading
light and picked up his copy of
A Beast in View.

At the beginning of Underhill’s first novel, a rich boy named Henry Harper is drafted
and sent to basic training in the South.
The sort of person who gradually but thoroughly undermines the favorable first impression
he creates, Harper is superficially charming, snobbish, selfish. Other people chiefly
either disgust or impress him. Of course he detests basic training, and is detested
by every other recruit on the base. Eventually he meets Nat Beasley, a black soldier
who seems to like him in spite of his faults and who detects a decent person beneath
Henry’s snobbery and self-consciousness. Nat Beasley defends Harper and gets him through
basic. Much to Harper’s relief, his father, a federal judge in Michigan, is able to
fix it that Henry and Beasley are assigned to the same unit in Vietnam. The judge
even manages to get Henry and Nat on the same flight from San Francisco to Tan Son
Hut. And during the flight, Henry Harper strikes a bargain with Nat Beasley. He says
that if Nat continues to protect him, Henry will guarantee him half of all the money
he will ever earn or inherit. This is a sum of at least two or three million dollars,
and Beasley accepts.

After about a month in the country, the two soldiers get separated from their unit
while on patrol. Nat Beasley picks up his M-16 and blows a hole the size of a family
Bible in Henry Harper’s chest. Beasley switches dogtags and then destroys Harper’s
body so completely that it is utterly unrecognizable. He then takes off cross-country
toward Thailand.

Michael read on, flipping pages at the bottom of a shaft of yellow light while an
incomprehensible movie played itself out on the small screen before him. Snores and
belches from sleeping pediatricians now and then cut across the humming silence of
the cabin. Nat Beasley makes a fortune brokering hashish in Bangkok, marries a beautiful
whore from Chiang Mai, and flies back to America with a passport made out to Henry
Harper. Pun Yin, or one of the other stewardesses, audibly sighed in a last-row seat.

Nat Beasley rents a car at the Detroit airport and drives to Grosse Point with the
beautiful Chiang Mai whore beside him. Michael saw him seated at the wheel of the
rented car, turning toward his wife as he pointed to Judge Harper’s great white house
at the far end of a perfect lawn. Behind these images, accompanying them, arose others—Poole
had not spent so many hours in the air since 1967 and moments from his uneasy flight
into Vietnam, encased in the self-same uneasiness, twined around the adventures of
Nat Beasley, the running grunt.

The strangeness of going to war on a regular commercial flight had stayed with him
for the entire day they were in the air. About three-fourths of the passengers were
new soldiers like
himself, the rest divided between career officers and businessmen. The stewardesses
had spoken to him without meeting his eyes, and their smiles had looked as temporary
as winces.

Michael remembered looking at his hands and wondering if they would be limp and dead
when he returned to America. Why hadn’t he gone to Canada? They didn’t shoot at you
in Canada. Why hadn’t he simply stayed in school? What stupid fatalism had ruled his
life?

Conor Linklater startled Michael by snapping upright in his seat. He blinked filmy
eyes at Michael, said, “Hey, you’re poring over that book like it was the Rosetta
stone,” and leaned back, asleep again before his eyes were closed.

Nat Beasley strolls through Judge Harper’s mansion. He muses on the contents of the
refrigerator. He stands in the judge’s closet and tries on the judge’s suits. His
wife lies across the judge’s bed, flipping through sixty cable channels with the remote-control
device.

Pun Yin stood beside Michael with her arms angelically outstretched, floating a blanket
down over Conor Linklater’s body. In 1967, a girl with a blonde pageboy tapped his
arm to awaken him, grinned brightly over his shoulder, and told him to prepare for
descent. His guts felt watery. When the stewardess opened the door, hot moist air
invaded the aircraft and Michael’s entire body began to sweat.

Nat Beasley lifts a heavy brown plastic bag from the trunk of a Lincoln town car and
drops it into a deep trench between two fir trees. He takes a second, lighter bag
from the trunk and drops it on top of the first.

The heat, Michael knew, would rot the shoes right off his feet.

Pun Yin switched off his reading light and closed his book.

The General, who was now a storefront preacher in Harlem, had left Tina alone with
Maggie for a moment in the clutter of his ornate living room on 125th Street and Broadway.
The General had been a friend of Maggie’s father, apparently also a general in the
Formosan army, and after General Lah and his wife had been assassinated, the General
had brought her to America—and this stuffy apartment in Harlem had been where Maggie
had fled! It was a puzzle, a relief, an irritation.

For one thing, his girlfriend turned out to be the daughter of a general. This explained
a lot about Maggie: she came by her pride naturally; she was used to getting her own
way; she liked to speak in communiqués; and she thought she knew all about soldiers.

“Didn’t you think I was worried about you?”

“You don’t mean worried about me, you mean jealous.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Because you don’t
own
me, Tina. And because it only works when I’m gone and you don’t know where I am.
You’re like a little boy, you know?”

He let that one pass.

“Because when I live with you, Tina, you wind up thinking that I’m this half-crazy
little punk who really just gets in the way of thinking about business and hanging
out with the guys.”

“That just says that
you’re
jealous, Maggie.”

“Maybe you’re not so dumb after all,” Maggie said, and smiled at him. “But you have
too many problems for me.” She was sitting on an ornately brocaded couch with her
legs folded under her, wrapped in some loose flowing dark woolen thing that was as
Chinese as the couch. The smile made Tina want to put his arms around her. Her hair
was different, less scrappy, more like a smooth thatch. Tina knew how Maggie’s heavy
silky hair felt in his hands, and he wished he could ruffle it now.

“Are you saying you don’t love me?”

“You don’t stop loving people, Tina,” she said. “But if I moved back in with you,
pretty soon you’d be secretly wondering how you could get rid of me—you’re so guilty,
you’ll never let yourself get married to anybody. You’ll never even get close.”

“You want to marry me?”

“No.” She watched his suspicious, surprised response. “I said, you have too many problems
for me. But that’s not the point. How you
behave
is the point.”

“Okay, I’m not perfect. Is that what you want me to say? I’d like you to come back
downtown with me, and you know it. But I could just as well walk away right now, and
you know that too.”

“Think about this, Tina. When I was putting all those ads in the
Voice
for you?”

He nodded.

“Didn’t you like seeing them?”

He nodded again.

“You looked for them every week?”

Tina nodded yet again.

“Yet you never even considered putting one in yourself, did you?”

“Is that what this is about?”

“Not bad, Tina. I’m glad you didn’t say you were too old for that sort of thing.”

“Maggie, a lot of things are going wrong right now.”

“Did the city close Saigon?”

“I closed it. It was getting to be impossible to cook and kill bugs at the same time.
So I decided to concentrate on killing bugs.”

“As long as you don’t get mixed up and start cooking them.”

Annoyed, he shook his head and said, “It’s costing me a ton of money. I’m still paying
a lot of salaries.”

“And you’re sorry you didn’t go to Singapore with the little boys.”

“Let’s put it this way. I’d be having more fun than I am now.”

“Right now?”

“Now in general.” He looked at her with love and exasperation, and she looked calmly
back. “I didn’t know you wanted me to put ads in the
Voice
too—otherwise I would have. It never occurred to me.”

She sighed and raised a hand, then slowly let it fall back to her folded knees. “Forget
about it. But just remember that I know you a lot better than you’ll ever know me.”
She gave him another calm look. “You’re worried about them, aren’t you?”

“Okay, I’m worried about them. Maybe that’s why I wish I was with them.”

She slowly shook her head. “I can’t believe that you get half-killed and think that
you should be able to go on the way you did before—like nothing happened.”

“Plenty happened, I don’t mind admitting it.”

“You’re scared, you’re scared, you’re scared!”

“Okay, I’m scared.” He exhaled noisily. “I don’t even like going out alone in the
daytime. At night I hear noises. I keep thinking—well, weird shit. About Nam.”

“All the time, or just at night?”

“Well, I can catch myself thinking weird shit at any time of the day or night, if
that’s what you mean.”

Maggie swung her legs out from beneath her. “Okay, I’ll come down and stay with you
for a while. As long as you remember that you aren’t the only one who can walk away.”

“How the hell could I forget that?”

And that was all it took. He did not even have to confess to
her that right before he had come uptown, he’d been standing in his kitchen holding
a bottle of beer and for a second had
known
that it was Ba Muy Ba and that the bullet with his name on it, the one that had missed
him all those years ago, was still circling the world, homing in on him.

The General who was now a preacher stared at Tina just as if he was still a pissed-off
general, and then barked a few words at Maggie in Chinese. Maggie answered with a
phrase that sounded sullen and adolescent, and the General proved to Tina once and
for all that he would never comprehend the Cantonese language by beaming at Maggie
and taking her in his arms and kissing the top of her head. He even shook Tina’s hand
and beamed at him too.

“I think he’s happy to get rid of you,” Tina said as they waited for the slow-moving,
odorous elevator.

“He’s a Christian, he believes in love.”

He could not tell if she were being sardonic or literal. This was often the case with
Maggie. The elevator clanked up to the General’s floor and opened its mouth. A sour
stench of urine rolled out. He could not let Maggie see that he was afraid of the
elevator. She was already inside, looking at him intently. Tina swallowed and stepped
into the reeking mouth of the elevator.

The doors slammed behind him.

He managed to smile at Maggie. Getting inside was the hardest part.

“What did he say to you, just before we left?”

Maggie patted his hand. “He said you were a good old soldier, and I should take care
of you and not get too mad at you.” She glinted up at him. “So I told him you were
an asshole and I was going back with you only because my English was getting rusty.”

Downstairs, Maggie insisted on taking the subway, and demonstrated that she could
still do an old trick of hers.

They had reached the top of the steps and were moving toward the token booth. The
wind cut through his heavy coat and lifted the hood against the back of his head.
When he looked around for Maggie and did not see her, the moment filled with a bright
dazzle of panic.

A noisy knot of boys in black jackets and knit caps, one of them toting a huge radio,
were punching the air and bopping along the platform in time to a Kurtis Blow song.
Black women in heavy coats leaned against the railing and paid them no attention.
Far ahead, a few men and women stared almost aimlessly down the tracks. Tina was suddenly,
painfully aware of how high
up in the air he was—suspended like a diver on a board. He wished that he was holding
onto a railing—it was as if the wind could lift him off the platform and smack him
down onto Broadway.

He had automatically fallen into line at the token booth. The boys had collected up
at the head of the platform. Tina reached into his pocket, furious with Maggie for
disappearing and furious with himself for caring.

Then he heard her giggle, and he snapped his head sideways to see her already past
the turnstile and out on the platform beside the impassive women. Her hands were shoved
deep in the pockets of her down coat, and she was grinning at him.

He got his token and went through the turnstile. He felt absurdly tangible. “How did
you do that?”

“Since you wouldn’t be able to do it anyhow, why should I tell you?”

When the train roared up before them, she took his hand and pulled him into the subway
car.

“Are they in Singapore yet?” she asked him.