Koko (52 page)

“This is it!” he screamed. “This is it, okay?”

Spitalny fired a flamethrower blast into a pen and incinerated two hens and a rooster.

Beevers swung the little girl around once more and this time split open her head against
the mazy tree. He threw down her body and came raging toward the center of the village.
“Now ask these people about Elvis,” he yelled. “Let’s get the truth out of these motherfuckers
for once.”

Underhill spoke to the old man, who was now trembling with mingled terror and rage,
and got back a rapid tirade that made him shake his head.

“You want to see how to do this? Watch.” Beevers stormed into the circle of cowering
Vietnamese and pulled to his feet the little boy Pumo had taken from a hootch. The
little boy was too frightened to speak, but the old woman who had been clutching him
began to wail. Beevers clipped her in the forehead with the butt of his .45, and she
toppled. Beevers clutched the child’s throat, pointed the .45 at his head, and said,
“Elvis? Elvis?”

The little boy gargled something.

“You know him. Where is he?”

Layers and curls of smoke drifted around them, carrying odors of burning straw and
singed meat. Spitalny was training his flamethrower on whatever was left in the ditch.
The hootches crackled around the lieutenant, the little boy, and the old people. Underhill
knelt beside the child and spoke to him in soft Vietnamese. The child did not look
as though he understood anything Underhill was saying. Poole saw Trotman approach
the hootch where he had killed the VC, and waved him off. Trotman went on to the next
hootch in the circle. A second later yellow flame grew along the roofline.

“I want his head!” Beevers yelled.

Poole began to trudge through the smoke toward the hootch where he had killed the
VC. He wanted to drag him outside before the hootch was fired. Everything was all
fucked up anyway. None of the hootches had been properly searched—Beevers had gone
crazy when he had been fired on. Where was that list, anyhow? Poole thought that after
the hootches burned down, they could still check beneath them for secret compartments—maybe
it would not be a total loss. He saw Dengler, dazed and covered in dust, walking back
toward the ditch to see what Spitalny was doing.

The problem was going to be to keep Beevers from killing all the old people. If he
found Elvis back in that hootch, which Michael had begun to think might be very likely,
Beevers would want to execute the whole village as VC. Then they’d double or triple
the body count, and the Tin Man would be another little step along the way to his
brigade.

For the first and only time in his military career, Michael Poole asked himself what
it was that the army wanted him to do—what America wanted him to do. His radio popped
and sizzled, and he ignored it. He stepped over Rowley’s body and went into the hootch.

The hootch was full of smoke and the smell of gunpowder.

Poole took another step through the smoke and saw the body kneeling before the far
wall of the hootch. A small black head, a brown shirt now wet with blood. The body
seemed to be all trunk—“main housing unit,” Beevers would have said. Poole saw no
grenade. Then he finally took in the size of the body curled up before the wall and
knew that he had not killed Elvis—he had killed a dwarf. He took another look around
for the dud grenade, breathing hard now without knowing why. He looked at the dwarf’s
hands, which were small and dirty. They were not a dwarf’s hands: they were not any
adult’s hands, being very delicate as well as crusted with dirt. Poole shook his head,
sweating, and lifted the shoulder of the VC’s body to get a look at his face.

The shoulder gave him almost no resistance at all, and the small body rolled over
to expose the face of a small boy of nine or ten. Poole allowed the boy’s body to
relax back down onto the floor. “Where’s that grenade?” he asked himself in a voice
that sounded normal. He kicked over a little table, scattering pins and combs and
a pair of round sunglasses. He tossed everything that was in the hootch upside-down—the
pallets, the tin cups, straw baskets, a few old photographs. He realized that he was
doing this to keep himself from fully understanding what he had done. There was no
grenade. He stood very still for a moment. The radio sizzled again, and Beevers yelled
his name.

Poole bent down and picked up the child’s corpse. It was about as heavy as the body
of a dog. He turned around and walked through the smoke to the hootch’s entrance.
The shrieking went up a notch when he came out.

Underhill blinked when Poole came toward him carrying the dead child, but said nothing.
A woman jumped up with her arms outstretched and her face broken into craziness by
grief. Poole
moved up to her and gave her the dead child. She sank down into the circle of old
people, crooning to the child.

Then at last the Phantom jets came wailing in over the village, their noise drowning
out the sounds of fire and human voices. The old people huddled close to the earth,
and the big jets screamed over the village and turned in the air. Off to the left
the forest around the cave became a single huge fireball. The forest made a noise
like a thousand wind machines all going at once.

I shot a little boy
, Poole said to himself.

In the next instant he realized that absolutely nothing was going to happen to him
because of what he had done. Lieutenant Beevers had smashed a girl’s head against
a tree. Spitalny had burned children to death in a ditch. Unless the entire platoon
was court-martialed nothing was going to happen. This too was terrible. There were
no consequences. Actions that took place in a void were eternal actions, and that
was terrible. Everything that surrounded Poole, the burning hootches, the curling
smoke, the earth beneath his boots, and the huddled old men and women, for a moment
seemed utterly unreal. He felt as if he could float up off the ground, if he wanted
to.

He decided not to float up off the ground. That was some serious shit. If you did
something like that, you’d be like Elvis, you couldn’t be sure you could ever get
back down.

He looked to his left and was surprised to see most of the men in the platoon standing
at the fringe of the village, watching the incineration of the forest. When had they
left the hootches? It seemed to him that there had been a break in time, an irrational
space, an area of blockage in which everything had changed positions without his knowing
or seeing it. The unreality of everything around him was much clearer now—the burning
forest was a kind of movie on a screen, and the burning hootches were places where
people lived in a story. It was an ugly story, and if you told it backwards by burning
down the little houses it would disappear. Totally. It would never have been. Things
were much better that way—the way in which the story got pulled backwards out of the
world through its own asshole and disappeared. He should have levitated while he had
the chance, because it no longer made any difference if he got back to earth or not.
Because it was not the real earth anymore, it was a movie. What they were watching
now was the unhappening of the story.

The whole village was going to unhappen.

Poole could see the ugly purple hill very clearly now. At the base of the hill, like
a fold in the rock, lay the entrance to a cave.

“That’s where everything is,” he heard Lieutenant Beevers say.

Poole almost called out when M.O. Dengler began to run toward the cave after the lieutenant.
Lieutenant Beevers was a human unhappening—nobody should follow him into a cave, but
especially not M.O. Dengler.

Poole wanted to yell, to keep Dengler from going into that place as Harry Beevers’
shield. Then he noticed Victor Spitalny sprinting after M.O. Dengler and Lieutenant
Beevers. Spitalny wanted to go in there with them. Spitalny was a soldier today, Spitalny
was red hot.

Pumo yelled Spitalny’s name, but Spitalny only turned his head and kept on running.
Running with his head turned, he looked like an image on a frieze.

The three men disappeared into the cave.

Poole turned back to the village and saw Tim Underhill trudging toward him through
the smoke.

Both men heard a muffled rattle of fire come from the cave. It died with such swiftness
it seemed never to have been. Behind them came the snapping and crunching of a hootch
falling in on itself. The villagers continued wailing. From the cave came again the
muffled sound of an M-16 firing in bursts. Poole’s mind and body unfroze, and he began
to run through the smoke toward the cave. He dimly saw the old man who must have been
the village chief stand up in the middle of the circle. He held the charred piece
of paper in his hands, and was yelling something in a squeaky high-pitched voice.

The brush still burned, sending runners of sparks along the blackened stalks. Here
and there the ground itself was burning. Trees had keeled over and collapsed into
themselves like cigarette ash. A cloud of smoke blocked the narrow entrance of the
cave, and as Poole ran toward it, he heard enraged painful screams coming from behind
the unmoving cloud.

A second later Victor Spitalny came windmilling through the smoke. His face was bright
red and he was screaming as if he had been tortured. Spitalny moved in an irregular
series of agitated,
aimless hops and jumps, like a man being given a series of powerful electrical shocks.
He must have been hit somewhere, but there was no blood on him. He was uttering a
series of high-pitched syllables which at length resolved themselves into “Kill ’em!
Kill ’em!” Then he lost his footing and fell into the ash near the mouth of the cave.
He began to thrash around, incapable of controlling himself enough to get back on
his feet. Poole pulled his groundcloth out of his pack, flipped it open, and bent
over Spitalny to roll him up inside it. Raised red welts covered Spitalny’s face and
neck. His eyes were swollen shut.

“Wasps!” Spitalny shrieked. “All over me!”

Through the smudges where the hootches had been, Poole could see all the villagers
standing up, straining to look toward them.

He yelled a question about the lieutenant and Dengler, but Spitalny kept shaking and
jerking. Spanky Burrage had knelt down and was pounding the groundcloth all over Spitalny’s
chest, flipped him over and began beating on his back. Then he burst out laughing.
“Fool, there ain’t nothin’ in there but you.”

“Look inside here and count all the dead wasps,” Spitalny said.

Poole stood up just as Dengler emerged through the cave’s narrow opening. He looked
whiter than ever, almost grey under the dirt. His rifle dangled from his right hand,
and his eyes seemed blurry with shock or exhaustion.

“Koko,” Dengler said, and half a dozen men looked at each other.

“What?” Poole asked. “What happened?”

“Nothing.”

“You waste Elvis?” asked Spanky Burrage.

“Nothing happened,” Dengler said. He took a few steps, stirring up sparks and ashes
with his boots, and looked over the expanse of destroyed earth to the old people,
all of them now standing in the center of what had been their village and looking
straight back at him.

Poole heard the villagers shouting something, but it took him a moment to separate
the voices enough to make out the words. What they were yelling was “Numbah ten!”

“Who was firing?”

“The good guys,” Dengler said, giving a faint smile to the reeking, smoke-filled air
between himself and the village.

“Is the lieutenant okay?” Poole wondered what he really hoped the answer to that question
would be.

Dengler shrugged.

“You numbah ten!” came from the villagers, repeated in a ragged random chaos of high-pitched
voices.

Poole realized that at some point he would no longer be able to delay going into that
opening in the rock. He would go in and a child would stand before him holding out
its hand in the darkness.

“You know something?” Dengler spoke in a monotone. “I was right.”

“You were right about what?”

“I was right about God.”

Now Spitalny stood in the sunlight with his shirt off, breathing hard. Red swellings
puffed out his shoulders, arms, and back, and his face was a collection of large,
red, angry-looking lumps. He looked like a plateful of yams. Norm Peters had begun
to spread a greasy white ointment over Spitalny’s shoulders.

Poole turned away from Burrage and walked across the smoking ground toward the medic
and Spitalny. After a second Burrage came too, as unwilling as Poole to go into the
cave.

Poole had taken only a few steps when he heard the approaching helicopter and looked
up toward a gnat-sized black dot in the sky. Wrong, he thought, go away, go back.

“I can’t figure this out,” Peters was saying. “Will you look at this? It doesn’t make
sense, not to me it doesn’t.”

“Is Dengler out?” Spitalny asked.

Poole nodded. “What doesn’t make sense?” But as soon as he had asked the question,
he saw. Spitalny’s narrow sharp-featured face had begun to reappear as the swellings
sank down into it. His eyes were visible now, and his forehead no longer bulged out
in a series of lumpy corrugations but ascended almost smoothly through eruptions like
undeclared pimples to his black widow’s peak.

“These aren’t wasp stings,” Peters said. “They’re hives.”

“Fuck you, they ain’t wasp stings,” said Spitalny. “The lieutenant ain’t outa there
yet. You better wrap yourself up in something and drag him out.”

“Even if they were wasp stings, the stuff I’m putting on wouldn’t reduce the swelling,
it’d just reduce the pain. You see how these things are going down?”

“Suck my dick,” Spitalny said. He held out his skinny arms and examined them—the swellings
had shrunk to the size and shape of leeches.

“You tell me,” Poole said. The helicopter had grown in the distance to the size of
a housefly.