Koko (6 page)

“Manly. Fucking Manly. And I’ll start to think about how did he manage to get all
that beer there, anyway? And then I’ll start to think about little things he did,
the way he acted.”

“Manly belonged behind a counter,” Beevers said.

“That’s right! I bet Manly’s got his own little business right now, he’s got everything
lined up just right, man, he’s got a good car and his own house, he’s got a wife,
kids, he’s got one of those basketball hoops up on his garage …” Conor stared into
space for a second, enjoying his vision of Manly’s life—Manly would be great in suburbia.
He thought like a criminal without actually being one, so he was probably making a
fortune doing something like installing security systems. Then Conor remembered that
in a way Manly had started all their troubles, back in Vietnam …

A day before they came into Ia Thuc, Manly had separated
from the column and found himself alone in the jungle. Without even meaning to make
noise, he started sounding like a six-foot bumblebee in a panic. Everyone else in
the column froze. A sniper known as “Elvis” had been dogging them for two days, and
Manly’s commotion was all he needed to improve his luck. Conor knew what he should
have done—he had discovered long ago how to make himself melt into the background.
It was almost mystical. Conor could virtually become invisible (and he knew it worked,
for twice VC patrols had looked right at him without seeing him). Dengler, Poole,
Pumo, even Underhill, could do this almost as well as he could, but Manly could not
do it at all. Conor began silently working through the jungle toward the sound—he
was angry enough to kill Manly, if that was what it took to shut him up. Within a
minute fraction of a second, he knew as if by telepathy—so silent—that Dengler was
following him.

They found Manly bulling through the curtain of green, hacking away with his machete
in one hand, his M-16 at his hip in the other. Conor started to glide up to him, half-thinking
about slitting his throat, when Dengler simply materialized next to Manly and grabbed
his machete arm. For a second they were motionless. Conor crept forward, afraid that
Manly would shriek after the numbness wore off. Instead, he heard a single report
from off to his right, somewhere up in the canopy, and saw Dengler topple over. He
felt shock so deep and sudden his hands and feet went cold.

He and Manly had walked Dengler back to the rest of the column. Even though the impact
had knocked him down and he was bleeding steadily, Dengler’s wound was only superficial.
A wad of flesh the size of a mouse had been punched out of his left arm. Peters made
him lie down on the jungle floor, packed and bandaged the wound, and pronounced him
fit to move.

If Dengler had not been wounded even so slightly, Conor thought, Ia Thuc might have
been just another empty village. Seeing Dengler in pain had soured everybody. It pumped
up their anxiety. Maybe they had all been foolish to believe in Dengler as they had,
but seeing him bloodied and wounded on the forest floor had shocked Conor all over
again—it was as bad as seeing him hit in the first place. After that, it had been
easy to blow it, go over the edge in Ia Thuc. Afterward nothing was the same. Even
Dengler changed, maybe because of the publicity and the court-martial. Conor himself
had stayed so high on drugs that he still could not remember some things that had
happened in the months between Ia Thuc and his DEROS—but he knew that just before
the court-martials he had cut the ears off a dead North Vietnamese soldier and stuck
a Koko card in his mouth.

Conor realized that he was in danger of getting depressed again. He was sorry he had
ever mentioned Manly.

“Refill,” he said, and went to the table and poured more vodka into his glass. The
other three were still looking at him, smiling at their cheerleader—other people always
counted on him to provide their good times.

“Hey, to the Ninth Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment.” Conor swallowed another ice-cold
bullet of vodka, and the face of Harlan Huebsch popped into his mind. Harlan Huebsch
was a kid from Oregon who had tripped a wire and blown himself in half a few days
after turning up at Camp Crandall. Conor could remember Huebsch’s death very clearly
because an hour or so afterwards, when they had finally reached the other side of
the little mined field, Conor had stretched out against a grassy dike and noticed
a long tangled strand of wire snagged in the bootlaces on his right foot. The only
difference between himself and Huebsch was that Huebsch’s mine had worked the way
it was supposed to. Now Harlan Huebsch was a name up on the Memorial—Conor promised
himself he’d find it, once they all got there.

Beevers wanted to toast the Tin Man, and though everybody joined him, Linklater knew
that only Beans meant it. Mike Poole toasted Si Van Vo, which Conor thought was hilarious.
Then Conor made everybody drink to Elvis. And Tina Pumo wound up toasting Dawn Cucchio,
who was a whore he met on R&R in Sydney, Australia. Conor laughed so hard at the idea
of drinking to Dawn Cucchio that he had to lean against the wall to hold himself up.

But then murkier, darker feelings surfaced in him again. If you wanted to accept the
reality of what was going on, he was an unemployed laborer sitting around with a lawyer,
a doctor, and a guy who owned a restaurant so fancy there were pictures of it in magazines.

Conor realized that he had been staring at Pumo, who looked like a page out of
GQ.
Tina always looked good, especially in his restaurant. Conor went there once or twice
a year, but spent most of his money at the bar. On his last visit he had seen a juicy
little Chinese girl who must have been Maggie. “Hey, Tina, what’s the best dish you
make, down there in your restaurant?”

Conor slurred a little on
best
, but he didn’t think the others could hear it.

“Duck Saigon, probably,” Tina said. “At least, that’s my favorite
right now. Marinated roast duck, dried rice noodles. The taste is out of sight.”

“You put that fish sauce on top of it?”

“Nuoc mam sauce? Sure.”

“I don’t know how anybody can eat that gook food,” Conor said. “Remember when we were
over there? We all knew you couldn’t eat that shit, man.”

“We were eighteen years old back then,” Tina said. “Our idea of a great meal was a
Whopper and fries.”

Conor did not admit to Tina that a Whopper and fries was still his idea of a great
meal. He gulped down another silver bullet of vodka and felt lower than ever.

But in a little while it was almost like the old days again. Conor learned that along
with all the normal Pumo difficulties, Tina now had to deal with the exciting new
complications caused by Maggie being nearly twenty years younger and not only as crazy
as he was, but smarter besides. When she moved in with him, Tina began feeling “too
much pressure.” This much was absolutely typical. What was different about Maggie
was that after a few months she disappeared. Now she was out-Pumoing Pumo. Maggie
called him on the telephone, but refused to tell him where she was staying. Sometimes
she placed coded messages for him on the back page of the
Village Voice.

“Do you know what it’s like to read the back page of every issue of the
Voice
when you’re forty-one?” Pumo asked.

Conor had never read any page of any issue of the
Village Voice.
He shook his head.

“Every mistake you ever made with a woman is right there in cold hard print. Falling
for someone’s looks—‘Beautiful blonde girl in Virginia Woolf T-shirt at Sedutto’s,
we almost talked and now I’m kicking myself. I know we could be special. Please call
man with backpack. 581-4901.’ Romantic idealization—‘Suki. You are my shooting star.
Cannot live without you. Bill.’ Romantic despair—‘I haven’t stopped hurting since
you left. Forlorn in Yorkville.’ Masochism—‘Bruiser—No guilt necessary, I forgive
you. Puffball.’ Cuteness—‘Twinky-poo. Twiddles wuvs yum-yum.’ Indecision—‘Mesquite.
Still thinking. Margarita.’ Of course there’s a lot of other stuff, too. Prayers to
St. Jude. Numbers you
can call if you want to get off coke. Baldness cures. Lots of Strip-O-Grams. And Jews
For Jesus, every single week. But mainly it’s all these broken hearts, this terrible
early-twenties agony. Conor, I have to pore over this back page like it was the Rosetta
stone. I get the damn paper as soon as it hits the stands on Wednesday morning. I
read the page over four or five times because it’s easy to miss clues the first couple
times. See, I have to figure out which messages are hers. Sometimes she calls herself
‘Type A’—that’s Taipei, where she was born—but other times she’s ‘Leather Lady.’ Or
‘Half Moon’—that was for a tattoo she got last year.”

“Where?” Conor asked. He didn’t feel so bad now, only a little drunk. At least he
wasn’t as fucked up as Pumo. “On her ass?”

“Just a little below her navel,” Tina said. He looked as though he was sorry he had
brought up the subject of his girlfriend’s tattoo.

“Maggie has a half moon tattooed on her pussy?” Conor asked. He wished he had been
in the tattoo parlor when that was going on. Even if Chinese girls weren’t Conor’s
thing—they reminded him of the Dragon Lady in “Terry and the Pirates”—he had to admit
that Maggie was more than normally good-looking. Everything about Maggie seemed
round.
She somehow managed to make it seem normal to walk around in chopped-up punk hair
and clothes you bought already ripped.

“No. I told you,” Pumo said, looking irritated, “just a little below her navel. The
bottom of a bikini covers most of it.”

“It’s almost on her pussy!” Conor said. “Is any of it in her hair? Were you there
when the guy did it? Did she cry or anything?”

“You bet I was there. I wanted to make sure he didn’t let his attention wander.” Pumo
took a sip of his drink. “Maggie didn’t even blink.”

“How big is it?” Conor asked. “About half dollar size?”

“If you’re so curious, ask her to show it to you.”

“Oh, sure,” Conor said. “I can really see me doing that.”

Then Conor overheard part of the conversation Mike Poole was having with Beans Beevers—something
about Ia Thuc and a grunt Poole had talked to during the parade.

Beevers asked, “He was an ex-combat soldier?”

“Looked like he got out of the field about a week ago,” Mike said, giving his little
smile.

“This vet really remembered all about me and he said I should get a Medal of Honor?”

“He said they should have given you a Medal of Honor for what you did, and then taken
it away again for shooting off your mouth in front of journalists.”

This was the first time Conor had ever heard Beevers confronted with the opinion,
once widely held, that he had been a dope to brag about Ia Thuc to the press. Of course
Beevers acted as though he were hearing this opinion for the first time.

“Ridiculous,” Beevers said. “I can just about go along with him on the Congressional
medal idea, but not on that. I’m proud of everything I did there, and I hope all of
you are too. If it was up to me, we’d all have Congressional medals.” He looked down
at the front of his shirt, smoothed it, then lifted his chin—stuck it out. “But people
know we did the right thing. That’s as good as a medal. People agree with the decision
of the court-martial, even if they forgot it ever happened.”

Conor wondered how Beans could say these things. He didn’t see how
people
could know they’d done the right thing at Ia Thuc when even the men who had been
there didn’t know exactly what had happened.

“You’d be surprised how many guys I meet, I’m talking about other lawyers, judges
too, who know my name because of that action,” Beevers said. “To tell you the truth,
being a sort of a minor league hero has helped me out professionally more than once.”
Beans looked around at all of them with a sweet candor that made Conor want to puke.
“I’m not ashamed of anything I did in Nam. You have to turn what happens to you into
a plus.”

Michael Poole laughed. “Spoken from the heart, Harry.”

“This is important,” Beevers insisted. For a second he looked both pained and puzzled.
“I have the impression that you three guys are accusing me of something.”

“I didn’t accuse you of anything, Harry,” Poole said.

“So didn’t I,” said Conor in exasperation. He pointed at Tina Pumo. “So didn’t he!”

“We were with each other every step of the way,” Harry said, and it took Conor a moment
to figure out that he had gone back to talking about Ia Thuc. “We always helped each
other out. We were a team, all of us, Spitalny included.”

Conor could restrain himself no longer. “I wish that asshole would have got killed
there,” he broke in. “I never met anybody as mean as him. Spitalny didn’t like
anybody
, man. Right? And he claimed he got stung by wasps? In that cave? I don’t think there
are any wasps in Nam, man. I saw bugs the size of dogs there, man, but I never saw
any wasps.”

Tina interrupted him with a loud groan. “Don’t talk to me about wasps. Don’t talk
to me about bugs—any kind of bugs!”

“Is this related to the trouble you’re having?” Mike asked.

“The Department of Health has strong feelings on the subject of six-legged creatures,”
Pumo said. “I don’t even want to discuss it.”

“Let’s get back to the subject, if you don’t mind,” Beevers said, giving Poole a mysteriously
loaded glance.

What the hell is the subject? Conor wondered.

Pumo said, “How about we have another little blast up here and then go down, get something
to eat, see some of the entertainment. Jimmy Stewart’s supposed to be here. I always
liked Jimmy Stewart.”

Beevers said, “Mike, are you the only one who knows what I was leading up to? Remind
them why we’re here. Help me out.”

“Lieutenant Beevers thinks it’s time to talk about Koko,” Poole said.