Koko (86 page)

And then what happened?

Nothing.

Nothing happened.

It has been two years since Michael Poole and I left the police station and drove
back to Saigon, Tina Pumo’s old restaurant, and nothing more has been heard of Koko,
or M.O. Dengler, or whatever he is calling himself now. There are times—times when
everything is going smoothly in my life—when I know that he is dead.

It is true that Koko must have yearned for death—I think he thought of himself as
giving his victims the gift of freedom from the fearful eternity he perceived all
about him.
“I am Esterhaz,”
he wrote in the note he left for Michael, and in part he meant that what happened
on the frozen banks of the Milwaukee River never stopped happening for him, no matter
how many times he killed in order to make it stop.
Backwards and forwards
describes an eternity which has become intolerable to the man caged within it.

Lieutenant Murphy finally sent Michael Poole copies of some photographs that had been
taken from the room at the YMCA.
These were photographs of convicted or accused serial murderers Dengler had clipped
from newspapers and magazines. Ted Bundy, Juan Corona, John Wayne Gacy, Wayne Williams,
David Berkowitz—over each head Dengler had drawn a flat round golden ring: a halo.
They were eternity’s agents, and in my worst moments I think that Koko saw us, the
members of Harry Beevers’ platoon, in that way too, as dirty angels, agents of release
from one kind of eternity into another.
I have work to do
, Koko said in the basement room on Elizabeth Street, and that we have not heard of
him or from him does not mean that his work is done or that he has stopped doing it.

A year after Koko lost himself in Honduras, I finished the book I had been writing.
My old publisher, Gladstone House, published it under the title
The Secret Fire;
the reviews were excellent, and the sales something less than that but at least good
enough to make me self-sufficient long enough to write what I thought would be my
next book, a “nonfiction novel” about M.O. Dengler and Koko. Now I know that I cannot
write that book—I don’t really know what a “nonfiction novel” is; you can’t tie an
eagle to a plough horse without making both of them suffer.

But as soon as I could afford to do it I took the same flight to Tegucigalpa from
which Koko escaped while Michael Poole and I were being sewn up and sedated in St.
Luke’s Hospital. And with the novelist’s provisional doubt I
saw
, as I
saw
the girl he had tried to murder in Bangkok, what happened on that flight. I saw how
it could have happened, and then I saw it happen.

This is one version of how Koko came to Honduras.

The jet is small and so old it rattles, and few North Americans are on board. The
Central American passengers have black hair and brick-colored skin, they are talkative
and exotic, and I think Koko would have felt immediately at home among them. He too
came out of the basement, he too left the children of Ia Thuc and the Patpong girl
behind him in the basement, and now another language echoes about him. I think he
closes his eyes and sees a wide plaza in a small sunstruck city, then sees the plaza
littered with dead and dying bodies. On the steps of the Cathedral, bodies lie sprawled
and twisted, their arms outflung, the fingers curled in toward the palms, the eyes
still open, staring. The sun is very near, a large white hazy disc like a halo. Abundant
flies. Koko is sweating—he imagines himself sweating, standing in the center of the
plaza, his skin prickling with the heat.

When the little plane lands at Belize two people get off into a shredding dazzle of
light that instantly devours them. At the
back of the plane, visible to the passengers, two men in brown uniforms pitch a few
suitcases out through an open bay. White cement, hard bouncing light.

In fifteen minutes they are back in that world above the world, above clouds and rainfall,
where Koko feels himself freed from gravity and near to—what? God, immortality, eternity?
Perhaps all of these. When he closes his eyes he sees a broad sidewalk lined with
cafés. Rows of empty white chairs fan out from white tables with colorful sun umbrellas,
and waiters in black waistcoats and black trousers stand in the open doorways of the
cafés. Then the music of eternity swells in his mind, and he sees bloodied corpses
sprawling in the chairs, the waiters slumped dead in the doorways, blood running into
the gutters and moving slowly down the pitched street.…

He sees brown naked children, sturdy peasant children with stubby hands and broad
backs, burned in a ditch.

Images, running without gravity or coherence, on a spool of film.

I have work to do.

When they land at San Pedro de Sula half a dozen suddenly impatient men and women
thrust their way through the aircraft, carrying woven baskets and bottles of duty-free
whiskey. The men’s neckties are pulled off-center, and their faces are filmed with
sweat. When they speak they growl like dogs, for they have evolved from dogs as some
men have evolved from apes and others from rats and mice, still others from panthers
and other feral cats, others from goats, snakes, some few from elephants and horses.
Koko squints through the window at a dull white bureaucratic building, the terminal.
A limp flag, half eaten by the light, droops over the building.

Not here.

After the pack has left the plane, a lone man carrying an orange boarding pass makes
his way down the aisle to the last row of seats. He is a Honduran, a San Pedro de
Sulan, in an ill-fitting tan sports jacket and a chocolate brown shirt, and his orange
boarding pass means that he is a domestic passenger.

Just before the plane begins to move again, Koko stands up, nods at the stewardess
(who has ignored him throughout the flight), and walks down the length of the plane
to sit beside the new passenger.

“Buen’ dia,”
the man says, and Koko smiles and nods.

A moment later they taxi away from the white boxy bureaucratic terminal. Shaking and
rattling, the plane rises up off the
earth and again enters the world without time. There are twenty minutes before they
will touch ground again, and sometime during that twenty minutes, perhaps at a moment
when the stewardess disappears either into the toilet or the cockpit, Koko stands
up and moves out into the aisle. His blood is zooming through his veins, and within
himself he feels a sweet necessary urgency. Eternity is holding its breath. Koko smiles
and points to the floor of the plane. He says, “Did you drop that money?” The man
in the tan jacket glances up sideways at Koko, then bends forward to look down at
the cabin floor. And Koko edges in beside him and puts his arms around the man’s neck
and gives the head a good firm twist. There is a
crack!
too quiet to be heard over the engine noise, and the man’s body sags into his seat.
Koko sits down beside the corpse. Now his feelings are impenetrable to me. There is
that question the civilian world is forever asking combat veterans, silently or outright,
How does it feel to kill someone?
, but Koko’s feelings at this moment are too personal, wedded to his terrible history,
and that is a darkness I cannot penetrate.

Let us say: he hears the dead man’s soul rushing out of the body beside him, and it
is a confused, unhappy soul, startled by its release.

Or let us say: Koko looks straight through the roof of the airplane and sees his father
seated in glory on a golden throne, nodding down at him with stern approval.

Or: he instantly feels the dead man’s being, his essence, slip into his own body through
his eyes or his mouth or the opening at the end of his penis and it is as if Koko
has eaten the man, for thoughts and memories flare within Koko’s mind, and Koko sees
a family and recognizes his brother, his sister:

he sees a little whitewashed house on a dirt lane with a rusty car before it,

he smells tortillas frying on a blackened griddle.…

Enough.

Koko removes the orange boarding pass from the man’s pocket and replaces it with his
own. Then he reaches into the man’s jacket and tweezes out his wallet. His fingers
open the wallet, he is curious to know who he is now, who it is that he has eaten
and now lives within him; he reads his new name. Finally he places over the dead man’s
face a magazine from the pouch before him and folds his hands in his lap. Now the
dead man is sleeping, and the stewardess will not bother to shake him until everyone
else is off the plane.

And then the plane begins to make its descent toward the tiny airport at La Cieba—

In a little while we will get to La Cieba.

Imagine that we are not in Central America, but in Vietnam. It is the rainy season,
and inside the tents at Camp Crandall the green metal lockers shine with condensation.
Sweet marijuana smoke hangs in the air, along with the music we are listening to.
Spanky Burrage, now a drug rehabilitation counselor in California, is playing tapes
on his big Sony reel-to-reel recorder, purchased in Saigon, the city not the restaurant,
at a very good cost. In a large green holdall at the foot of Spanky’s cot are thirty
or forty reels of music recorded by friends of his in Little Rock, Arkansas. These
are nearly all jazz tapes, and hand-lettered labels on the cardboard boxes identify
who is on each tape:
Ellington, Basie, Parker, Rollins, Coltrane, Clifford Brown, Peterson, Tatum, Hodges,
Webster …

This is the brothers’ tent, and in here music is always playing. M.O. Dengler and
I are admitted here because we love jazz, but in truth Dengler, who is more or less
loved by every soldier in camp, would be welcome here even if he thought that Lawrence
Welk led a great jazz band.

The music sounds different here than it would back in the world: it has different
things to say here, and so we must listen to it very carefully.

Spanky Burrage knows his tapes very well. He has the exact location of the beginning
of virtually every song memorized, so that he can find any selection just by running
the tape backwards or forwards. Therefore his memory allows him to play long sequences
of the same song performed by different musicians. Spanky enjoys doing this. He will
play an Art Tatum version of “The Sunny Side of the Street,” then one by Dizzy Gillespie
and Sonny Rollins; “Indiana” by Stan Getz, then a version with the same chords but
another melody by Charlie Parker called “Donna Lee”; “April in Paris” by Count Basie,
then by Thelonious Monk; sometimes five versions of “Stardust” in a row, six of “How
High the Moon,” a dozen blues, everybody going to the same well but returning with
different water.

Spanky always came back to Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker. And I sat in front of
the speakers of the Sony beside M.O. Dengler maybe twenty times while Spanky followed
Duke Ellington’s “Koko” with the Charlie Parker song that had the same name.
Same name—

“—but oh so different,” Spanky says. And he whips the tape through the reels until
the desired number comes up on the counter without his bothering to look at it, and
drawing on a long cigarette rolled from Si Van Vo’s finest, he pushes
STOP
and then
PLAY.

In Vietnam, this is what we hear. The Ellington “Koko” first.

It is a music of threat, and it is world-music, meaning that a world is held within
it. Long ominous notes on a baritone saxophone counterpoint blasts from trombones.
A lurching, swaying, uneasy melody begins in the saxophone section. From the darkness
two trombones whoop and shake, going
wa waaa wa waa
like human voices on the perimeter of speech. These are noises that jump right out
of the speakers and come toward you like a crazy father in the middle of the night.
The piano utters nightmarish chords which are half-submerged in the cacophony of the
band, and at the end Jimmy Blanton’s bass pads through the band like a burglar, like
a sapper crawling toward our perimeter. It did not occur to us that there might be
something deliberately theatrical, even comic, in all this menace.

“Okay,” Spanky says, “the Bird.” He snaps off the Ellington reel, snaps on the Parker.
Spanky Burrage reveres the Bird, Charlie Parker. He threads the tape, advances to
the correct number, but again he hardly has to look at the counter. Spanky knows when
“Koko” has been reached.
STOP. PLAY.

We are instantly in another world, one as threatening but far newer—a world that is
still being mapped. This “Koko” was recorded in 1945, five years after the Ellington,
and Modernism has finally come to jazz. The Parker “Koko” is based on the song “Cherokee,”
written by the English bandleader Ray Noble, though you would never know this unless
you happen to recognize the harmonic pattern.

It begins with improvised passages of great complexity and urgency, and finally comes
to a theme fragment, which is a brusque abstraction of “Cherokee,” as unsentimental
as a Picasso portrait of Dora Maar or a paragraph by Gertrude Stein. This is not the
music of collective statement like the Ellington piece, but fiercely individual. After
the abstraction of the theme is played, Parker begins. All through the first chorus
has been a sense of impendingness, and it is for this that we have been prepared so
efficiently.