Koko (38 page)

In fact Hal Esterhaz is not even his real name, but had been
given to him by social workers: his identity and parentage, even his exact age, are
mysterious. All he knows of his origins is that he was found at the age of three or
four, covered with frozen mud, wandering the downtown streets near the river in the
middle of December. He had known no language; he had been starved nearly to death.

Even now, Esterhaz could not remember long stretches of his wretched childhood, and
could remember none of his life before he was found wandering naked and starved on
a street beside the Monroe River. His dreams of that time were of a golden world where
giants petted him, fed him, and called him by a name that was never audible.

Hal Esterhaz had twice dropped out of school, been in trouble with the law, had spent
his adolescence in a steamy obliterating hatred of everything about him. He had joined
the army in a fit of drunken self-loathing, and the army had saved him. All his most
decent, most dependable memories virtually began with basic training. It was, he thought,
as if he had been three times born: once into the golden world, then into frozen,
bitter Monroe, finally into uniform. His superiors had soon recognized his innate
abilities and eventually recommended him for OCS. In exchange for another four years
of service he would happily have served anyhow, he received the training that sent
him to his second tour in Vietnam as a lieutenant.

After the murder of the butcher, Esterhaz begins to dream of washing blood from his
hands, of standing sweaty and fearful at his sink, holding his bloodied hands under
the steaming water, his shirt off, his chest dappled with red … he dreams of opening
a door onto a garden of sick roses, roses of an unnatural, bright, chemical blue.
He dreams that he is driving his car into deep darkness, with a familiar corpse on
the seat beside him.

A second recognition came to Michael at this point, that surely he remembered M.O.
Dengler once inserting into his tales of a fabulous Milwaukee—tales of finding a sick
angel in a packing case and feeding him Cracker Jacks until he could fly again, of
the man who made ice burn by breathing on it, of the famous Milwaukee criminal from
whose mouth rats and insects flew instead of words—something about his parents being
only half his parents, whatever that had meant.

Poole fell asleep with the book on his chest, no more than a hundred yards or so from
the spot on Phat Pong Road where Dengler had bled to death.

According to the Army of the United States of America, Private First Class Dengler
was the victim of a homicidal attack by person or persons unknown. Said attack occurred
during Private Dengler’s Rest and Recreation tour in the city of Bangkok, Thailand.
Private Dengler suffered multiple cranial fractures, compound fractures of right and
left tibia and fibula, fracture of the sacrum, rupture of the spleen, rupture of the
right kidney, and puncture wounds in the upper portions of both lungs. Eight of Private
Dengler’s fingers had been severed, and both arms were dislocated. The nose and jaw
had been splintered by multiple fractures. The skin of the deceased had been severely
abraded, and much of the face torn away by the assailants. Identification had been
secured through the victim’s dogtags.

The Army found it unwise or unnecessary to speculate on the reasons for the attack
on Private First Class Dengler, restricting its comments in this regard to a consideration
of the tensions that
grew up between members of the American Armed Forces and native populations.

In the light of the
Sergeant Khoffi
(1967) and
Private First Class Springwater
(1968) incidents in Bangkok, the formation of a commission to recommend on the advisability
of restricting Rest and Recreation tours in the city of Bangkok to officer rank personnel
was advised. (Attention was also drawn to less severe incidents in Honolulu and Hong
Kong, and to the military-civilian-police triangle pertaining in these cities.)

Give us data, the Army pleaded, give us a Commission. (The recommendation was noted,
considered, and shelved.) We advise an on-site study. (Also shelved.) Good liaison
with local police being imperative, we suggest an assignment of officers with police
training to police departments in Rest and Recreation areas where incidents such as
above have been proven to be likely. (This recommendation, offered as a sop to the
Police Department of the City of Bangkok, was never taken any further.) It was recommended
that Military Police in Bangkok liaise with the Bangkok Police Department to seek
out and locate local witnesses to the attack on PFC Dengler, identify and apprehend
the soldier who had been seen in PFC Dengler’s company just before the incident, and
seek to apprehend and prosecute all those responsible for the homicide of PFC Dengler.
The unidentified soldier who had been seen with PFC Dengler was finally named three
weeks later as PFC Victor Spitalny, who had been sent to Honolulu for his R&R.

In PFC Dengler’s medical files, cause of death was given as loss of blood due to gross
physical trauma.

His parents were informed that he had died bravely and would be very much missed by
his fellow soldiers—Beevers wrote this letter half-resentfully, loaded on popskull
vodka from Manly’s private stock.

Then the Army held its breath. Victor Spitalny was not pulled
out of the Heaven Massage Parlor or the Mississippi Queen by the Bangkok police, and
the American MPs in Bangkok did not pull him out of a Patpong gutter. Police in Milwaukee,
Wisconsin, which rather surprisingly turned out to be the birthplace of PFC Spitalny,
did not locate the missing soldier, charged by now with the crime of desertion, at
his parents’ house, the house of his former girlfriend, or at the Sports Tavern, Sam
‘N’ Aggie’s, or the Polka Dot Lounge, where the deserter had sought diversion and
entertainment before entering military service.

No one in Bangkok, Camp Crandall, or the Pentagon mentioned a little girl who had
run bleeding down Phat Pong Road, no one alluded to the shouts and cries that disappeared
into the polluted air. The little girl disappeared into rumor and fiction, then disappeared
altogether, like the thirty children in the cave at Ia Thuc, and eventually the army,
having moved on to other cases and other problems, forgot that it was holding its
breath.

What was it like to go on R&R?

It was like being on another planet. Like being
from
another planet.

Why was it like being from another planet?

Because not even time was the same. Everybody moved with great unconscious slowness,
everybody talked slow and smiled slow and thought slow.

Was that the only difference?

The people were the biggest difference. What they thought was important, what made
them happy.

Was that the only difference?

Everybody’s making money and you’re not. Everybody’s spending money, and you’re not.
Everybody’s got a girl. Everybody’s got dry feet and they all eat real food.

What did you miss?

I missed the real world. I missed Nam. Where there’s a whole different top ten.

Top ten?

Sounds that make you feel sick with excitement. You want the songs from your own planet.

Will you tell me about the girl?

She came out of the screams the way birds come out of
clouds. She was an image—that was the first thing I thought. That she
had
to be seen, that she
had
to present herself. She was from my world. She was
loose.
The way Koko got
loose.

Why did you think she was screaming?

I thought she was screaming because of the nearness of ultimate things.

How old was she?

She might have been ten or eleven.

What did she look like?

She was half-naked, and her upper body was covered with blood. There was blood even
in her hair. Her hands were outstretched in front of her, and they were red with blood
too. She might have been a Thai. She might have been Chinese.

What did you do?

I stood on the sidewalk and watched her run past me.

Did anybody else see her?

No. One old man blinked and looked troubled. Nothing else.

Why didn’t you stop her?

She was an
image.
She was
uncanny.
She’d have died if you stopped her. Maybe you’d die too. I just stood there in the
midst of the crowd and watched her run past me.

How did you feel when you saw her?

I loved her.

I felt I saw everything that was the truth in her face—in her eyes. Nothing is sane,
that’s what I saw, nothing is safe, terror and pain are beneath everything—I think
God sees things that way, only most of the time He doesn’t want us to see it too.

I had the Pan-feeling. I felt like she had burned my brain. I felt like my eyes had
been scorched. She thrashed down the bright street in the midst of all her commotion,
showing her bloody palms to the world, and she was gone.
Pan
-ic. The nearness of ultimate things.

What did you do?

I went home and wrote. I went home and wept. Then I wrote some more.

What did you write?

I wrote a story about Lieutenant Harry Beevers, which I called “Blue Rose.”

Michael Poole and Conor Linklater separated on their second day in Bangkok. Conor
went through a dozen gay bars in Patpong 3, asking his question about Tim Underhill
to baffled but kindly Japanese tourists who usually offered to buy him a drink, to
jumpy-looking Americans who usually pretended that they could not see or hear him,
and to various smiling Thai men, who assumed that he was looking for his lover and
offered the services of decorative young men who would soon heal his broken heart.
Conor had forgotten his stack of photographs in his hotel room. He looked at small,
pretty boys in dresses and thought of Tim Underhill while wishing that these frothy
creatures were the girls they so much resembled. The bartender in a transvestite bar
called Mama’s made Conor stop breathing for a few seconds when he blinked at Underhill’s
name and stood looking at him, smiling and stroking his chin. But at last he giggled
and said, “Never saw him in here.”

Conor smiled at the man, who appeared to be melting a lump
of some delicious substance, chocolate or butter, on his tongue. “You acted like you
knew him.”

“Can’t be sure,” the bartender said.

Conor sighed, took a twenty-baht note from the pocket of his jeans, and slid it across
the bar.

The man pocketed the bill and stroked his chin again. “Maybe, maybe,” he said. “Undahill.
Timofy Undahill.” Then he looked up at Conor and shook his head. “Sorry, my mistake.”

“You little asshole,” Conor heard himself say. “You shithead, you took my money.”
Without in any way planning to do so and without even recognizing that he was suddenly
very angry, Conor ground his teeth and reached across the bar. The bartender giggled
frantically and stepped backwards, but Conor lunged for him and closed his hands on
his white shirt.

“Earn your money, goddamnit. Who did you think it was? Someone who came in here?”

“Mistake, mistake!” the bartender cried. A few men who had been drinking at the bar
had come toward Conor and the bartender, and one of these men, a Thai in a light blue
silk suit, patted Conor on the shoulder.

“Calm yourself,” the Thai said.

“Calm myself, nothing,” Conor said. “This asshole took my money and now he won’t talk.”

“Here is money,” said the bartender, still yanked halfway across his bar. “Have free
drink. Please. Then please leave.” He plucked the bill from his pocket and dropped
it on the bar.

Conor let go of the man. “I don’t want the money,” he said. “Keep the goddamn money.
I just want to know about Underhill.”

“You are looking for a man named Tim Underhill?” asked the dapper little Thai in the
blue silk suit.