Koko (19 page)

“They got there three or four days ago, I think.”

“My brother says they’re going to Taipei too.”

“I guess it’s possible. They’ll go wherever they have to go to find Underhill.”

Maggie gave him a half-scathing, half-sympathetic look. “Poor Tina.” She took Tina’s
hand into her soft, down-padded lap.

He sat beside her in the loud train, his fear now mostly under control. No one was
staring at him. His hand rested within both of Maggie’s funny little hands, in her
lap.

South they flew beneath Manhattan in the filthy train, Maggie Lah with her large secret
feelings and Tina Pumo with his, which ran queerly parallel to those of his friends
under the patient gaze of Pun Yin. I love Maggie and I am afraid of that. She’s a
kind of original. She leaves me in order to keep me, she’s smart enough to get out
before I kick her out, and she proves it by coming back as soon as I really need her.
And maybe Underhill is crazy and maybe I’m crazy too, but I hope they find him and
bring him back.

Here is Tim Underhill, Tina thought, here is Underhill out in a section of Camp Crandall
known familiarly to the madmen of the good old Rearing Elephant as Ozone Park. Ozone
Park is a bleak section of wasteland about the size of two city blocks between the
rear of Manly’s “club” and the wire perimeter. Its amenities consist of one piss-tube,
which provides relief, and a huge pile of empty metal barrels, which offers shade
and a pervasive smell of
oil. Ozone Park does not officially exist, so it is safe from the incursions of the
Tin Man, for whom, in true army fashion,
should
exactly equals
is.
Here is Tim Underhill, in the company of a number of comrades wasted on Si Van Vo’s
100s and getting more wasted on a little white powder Underhill has produced from
one of his pockets. Here is Underhill recounting to all the others, who include besides
myself, M.O. Dengler, Spanky Burrage, Michael Poole, Norman Peters, and Victor Spitalny,
who just lurks around the edges of the barrels, now and then tossing little stones
toward the others, the tale of the running grunt. A young man of good family, Underhill
says, the son of a federal judge, is drafted and sent to good old Fort Sill in beautiful
Lawton, Oklahoma.…

“I sure get sick of the sound of your voice,” sneers Spitalny from off to the side,
near the barrels. He flings a stone at Underhill and strikes him in the middle of
his chest.

“You’re still nothing but a fucking queer,” Spitalny says.

—And you’re still a shithead, Pumo remembers saying eloquently to Spitalny, who returned
the favor by throwing a stone at him, too.

It took a long time to adjust to the “flowers,” because it took a long time to understand
that Underhill never corrupted anybody, that he could not corrupt anybody because
he himself was not corrupt. Though most of the soldiers Puma knew claimed to despise
Asian women, nearly all of them used whores and bar girls. The exceptions were Dengler,
who clung to his virginity in the belief that it was the talisman that kept him alive,
and Underhill, who picked up young men. Pumo wondered if the others knew that Underhill’s
flowers were in their early twenties, and that there had been only two of them. Pumo
knew this because he had met them both. The first was a one-armed former ARVN with
a girl’s face who lived with his mother in Hue and made a living grilling meat at
a food stall until Underhill began to support him. The other flower actually worked
in the Hue flower market, and Pumo had eaten dinner with the young man, Underhill,
the young man’s mother, and his sister. He had seen such a remarkable quantity of
tenderness flow among the other four people at the table that he would have been adopted
by them if he could. Underhill supported this family, too. And now in an odd way Pumo
supported them, for when Underhill’s best-loved flower, Vinh, finally managed to locate
him in New York in 1975, Pumo remembered the excellence of the meal as well as the
warmth and kindness in the little house, and hired him. Vinh had undergone deep changes—he
looked older, harder, less joyous. (He had also fathered
a child, lost a wife, and served a long apprenticeship in the kitchen of a Vietnamese
restaurant in Paris.) None of the others knew Vinh’s history. Harry Beevers must have
seen him once with Underhill and then forgotten the occasion, because for reasons
of his own Beevers had convinced himself that Vinh was from An Lat, a village near
Ia Thuc—whenever Beevers saw either Vinh or his daughter, he began to look persecuted.

“You look almost happy now,” Maggie said to him.

“Underhill can’t be Koko,” Tina replied. “The son of a bitch was crazy, but he was
crazy in the sanest possible way.”

Maggie did not say or do anything, did not change her grip on his hand, did not even
blink at him, so he could not tell if she had heard him. Maybe she felt insulted.
The noisy subway clattered into their station and came to a jerky stop. The doors
whooshed open, and Pumo froze for a second. As the noises outside the car resolved
themselves, Maggie pulled him to his feet. When Pumo got out of the train he bent
over and hugged Maggie as hard as he could.

“I love you too,” she said. “But I don’t know if I’m being crazy in a sane way, or
vice versa.”

She gasped when they turned into Grand Street.

“I suppose I should have prepared you,” Pumo said.

Stacks of bricks, piles of boards, bags of plaster, and sawn lengths of discarded
pipe covered the sidewalk outside Saigon. Workmen in green parkas and heavy gloves,
heads bent against the wind, wheeled barrows of rubble out of the front door and laboriously
dumped them into a skip. Two trucks stood double-parked beside the skip, one marked
with the name
SCAPELLI CONSTRUCTION CO.
, the other bearing the stenciled legend
MCLENDON EXTERMINATION.
Men in hard hats wandered back and forth between the restaurant and the trucks. Maggie
saw Vinh talking to a woman holding a wide set of unrolled blueprints, and the chef
winked at her, then waved at Pumo. “Must talk,” he called out.

“What’s it like inside?” Maggie asked.

“Not as bad as it looks from here. The whole kitchen is torn apart, of course, and
most of the dining room is too. Vinh’s been helping me out, cracking the whip when
I’m not around. We had to take down the whole back wall, and then we had to rebuild
some of the basement.” He was fitting his key into the white door next to Saigon’s
door, and Vinh shook the architect’s hand and came over in a rush before he could
open it.

“Nice to see you again, Maggie,” Vinh said, and followed it
with something in Vietnamese to Pumo. Tina answered in Vietnamese, groaned, and turned
to Maggie with increased worry plain on his face.

“Floor fall down?”

“Someone broke in this morning. I haven’t been in since about eight, when I went out
to get breakfast and check in with some suppliers. We’re expanding the kitchen, as
long as we have to do all this work, and as usual I have to chase around all over
the place, which I was doing until I was stopped in my tracks by the back page of
the
Village Voice
.”

“How could anybody break in with all this going on?”

“Oh,” he said. “They didn’t break into the restaurant. They broke into my loft. Vinh
heard someone moving around upstairs, but he thought it was me. Later he went up to
ask me about something, and realized that it must have been an intruder.”

Tina looked almost fearfully up the narrow flight of steps that led to his loft.

“I don’t suppose Dracula came back to pay a social call,” she said.

“No, I don’t suppose so either.” Tina did not sound convinced of this. “The bitch
might have remembered some stuff she forgot to steal, though.”

“It’s just a burglar,” Maggie protested. “Come on, let’s get out of the cold.” She
took a couple of steps up the stairs, then reached down, grasped Tina’s elbows with
both hands, and pulled him toward her. “You know when most burglaries are committed,
white boy? Around ten in the morning, when the bad guys know everybody else is at
work.”

“I know that,” Tina smiled at her. “Honest, I know that.”

“And if little Dracula comes back for your body, I’ll turn her into … hmm …” She rolled
her eyes up and stuck a forefinger into her cheek. “Into egg drop soup.”

“Into Duck Saigon. Remember where you are.”

“So let’s go up and get it over with.”

“Like I said.”

He followed her up the stairs to the door of his loft. Unlike the white door downstairs,
it was locked.

“One better than Dracula,” Maggie said.

“It locks when you close it. I’m still not sure it wasn’t goddamned Dracula.” Pumo
unlocked the door and stepped inside ahead of Maggie.

His coats and outerjackets still hung on their hooks, his boots were still lined up
beneath them.

“Okay so far.”

“Stop being such a
coward
,” Maggie said, and gave him a push. A little way along was the door to his bathroom.
Nothing in the bathroom was disturbed, but Pumo had a vivid vision of Dracula standing
in front of the shaving mirror, bending her knees and fluffing up her Mohawk.

The bedroom was next. Pumo took in the unmade bed and empty television stand—he had
left the bed that way, and had not yet replaced the nineteen-inch Sony Dracula had
stolen from this room. The closet doors hung open, and a few of his suits drooped
from their hangers toward an untidy heap of other clothes.

“Goddamn, it
was
Dracula.” Pumo felt a layer of sweat pop out over what seemed his entire body.

Maggie looked up at him questioningly.

“The first time she stole my favorite jacket and my favorite pair of cowboy boots.
SHIT! She loves my wardrobe!” Pumo slammed his fists against the sides of his head.

He was instantly across the room, lifting articles of clothing from the closet floor,
examining them and putting them back on hangers.

“Did Vinh call the police? Do you want to call them?”

Pumo looked up at Maggie from an armload of clothes. “What’s the point? Even if they
find her and by some miracle put her away, she’ll be back outside in about a day and
a half. That’s how we do it in this country. In Taipei you probably have an entirely
different system.”

Maggie leaned against the doorframe. Her arms hung straight down, parallel to each
other, at an angle to her body. She had funny knobby little hands, Pumo noticed for
perhaps the thousandth time. She said, “In Taipei, we staple their tongues to their
upper lips and hack three fingers off each hand with a dull knife.”

“Now that’s what I call justice,” Pumo said.

“In Taipei, that’s what we call liberalism,” Maggie said. “Is anything missing?”

“Hang on, hang on.” Pumo put the last suit on its hanger, the hanger on the rail.
“We haven’t even gotten to the living room yet. I’m not even sure I want to get to
the living room.”

“I’ll look in there, if you like. As long as we can eventually come back in here and
take our clothes off and do all those things we were originally intending to do.”

He looked at her with undisguised astonishment.

“I’ll make sure the enemy has retreated from the living room,” Maggie said in her
flat precise voice. She disappeared.

“GODDAMN IT! DAMN IT!” Pumo yelled a few seconds later. “I KNEW IT!”

Maggie leaned into the bedroom again, looking startled and a little breathless. Her
heavy black hair swung, and her lips were parted. “You called?”

“I don’t believe it.” Pumo was gazing at the empty night-stand beside his bed, and
looked palely up at Maggie. “How does the living room look?”

“Well, in the second I had before I was distracted by the screams of a madman, it
appeared to be slightly rumpled but otherwise okay.”

“It was Dracula, all right.” Pumo did not like the sound of
slightly rumpled.
“I knew it, damn it. She came back and stole all the same stuff all over again.”
He pointed to the nightstand. “I had to buy a new clock radio, and that’s gone. I
got a new Watchman, and the asshole stole that too.”

Pumo watched beautiful little Maggie come floating into his bedroom in her loose flowing
Chinese garment and mentally saw a fearful vision of his living room. He saw the cushions
ripped, the books tumbled from the shelves, his desk upended, his living room television
gone, the answering machine gone, his checkbooks, the ornamental screen he brought
back from Vietnam, his VCR, and most of his good liquor, all gone. Pumo did not consider
himself immoderately attached to his possessions, but he braced himself for the loss
of these things. He would mind most of all about the couch, which Vinh had made and
upholstered for him by hand.

Maggie lifted a drooping corner of a blanket with one hovering foot, and uncovered
the clock radio and the new Watchman, which had apparently fallen from the nightstand
sometime in the morning.

Without a word, she led him into the living room. Pumo admitted to himself that it
looked almost exactly as it had when he left it.

The smooth, plump, speckled blue fabric still lay unblemished over Vinh’s long couch,
the books still stood, in their customary disorder, on the shelves and, in piles,
on the coffee tables; the television stood, stupid as an idol, in its place on the
shelf beneath the VCR and the showy stereo. Pumo looked at the records on the shelf
beneath and knew immediately that someone had flipped through them.

At the far end of the room two steps led up to a platform, also carpentered by Vinh.
Here were shelves stacked with bottles—a couple of shelves crammed with cookbooks,
too—a sink, a concealed icebox. An armchair, a lamp. Shoved into a corner of the platform
was Pumo’s desk and leather desk chair, which had been pulled out and moved to one
side, as if the intruder had wished to spend time at the desk.

“It doesn’t look too bad,” he said to Maggie. “She came in here and looked around,
but she didn’t do any damage I can see.”