Koko (9 page)

Poole awoke with a fading memory of smoke and noise, of artillery fire and uniformed
men running in a cartoonish lockstep through a burning village. He pushed this vision
into forgetfulness with unconscious expertise. His first real thought was that he
would stop off at Walden Books in Westerholm and buy a book for a twelve-year-old
patient named Stacy Talbot before visiting her in St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. Then
he remembered that he was in Washington. His second fully formed thought was to wonder
if Tim Underhill was really still alive. He had a brief vision of himself standing
in a neat graveyard in Singapore, looking down with both loss and relief at Underhill’s
headstone.

Or was Underhill simmering in craziness, still back in the war?

Conor Linklater seemed to have vanished and left behind a crushed pillow and a wildly
wrinkled counterpane. Poole crawled across the bed and peered over the far edge. Curled
up into himself
like a cabbage leaf, his mouth lax and his eyelids stretched unmoving across his eyes,
Conor lay asleep on the floor.

Michael pushed himself back across the bed and went quietly into the bathroom to shower.

“Jeez,” Conor said when Michael came out of the bathroom. He was sitting in one of
the chairs and holding his head in both hands. “What time is it, anyhow?”

“About ten-thirty.” Poole took underwear and socks from his bag and began dressing.

“Blackout, man,” Conor said. “Total hangover.” He peeked out through his fingers at
Poole. “How’d I end up here, anyhow?”

“I sort of assisted you.”

“Thanks, man,” Linklater groaned. His head sank again into his hands. “I gotta turn
over a new lease on life. I been partying too much lately, getting old, gotta slow
down.
Whoo.
” He straightened up and looked around the room as if he were lost. “Where’s my clothes?”

“Pumo’s room,” Michael said, buttoning his shirt.

“Well, I don’t know. I left all my shit up there. I sure wish he’d come along with
us, man, don’t you? Pumo the Puma. He oughta come along. Hey, Mikey, can I use your
bathroom and your shower before I go back upstairs?”

“Oh dear,” Poole said. “I just got it all cleaned up for the maid.”

Conor left the couch and moved across the room in a fashion that Poole associated
with recovering stroke victims in geriatric wards. When Conor got to the bathroom
he leaned on the doorknob and coughed. His hair was standing up in little orange spikes.
“Am I crazy, or did Beans say he’d loan me a couple thousand bucks?”

Poole nodded.

“Do you think he meant it?”

Poole nodded again.

“I’ll never figure that guy out, I guess,” Conor said, and slammed the bathroom door
behind him.

After he pushed his feet into his loafers, Poole went to the telephone and dialed
Judy’s number. She did not answer, nor did her machine. Poole hung up.

A few minutes later Beevers called down to inform Michael and Conor that he was offering
room-service breakfast for everybody in his suite
(en suite)
, commencing in thirty minutes at
eleven hundred hours, and that Michael had better get hopping if he wanted more than
one Bloody Mary.

“More than one?”

“I guess you didn’t get the kind of exercise I had last night,” Beevers gloated. “A
lovely lady, the kind I was telling you about, left about an hour or two ago, and
I’m as mellow as a month in the country. Michael—try to persuade Pumo that there are
more important things in the world than his restaurant, will you?” He hung up before
Poole could respond.

Beevers’ suite had not only a long living room with sliding windows onto a substantial
balcony but was equipped with a dining room where Michael, Pumo, and Beevers sat at
a round table laden with plates of food, baskets of rolls, racks of toast, pitchers
of Bloody Marys, chafing dishes holding sausages, bacon, and eggs Benedict.

From the couch in the living room where he sat hunched over a cup of black coffee,
Conor said, “I’ll eat something later.”

“Mangia, mangia.
Keep your strength up for our trip.” Beevers waggled a fork dripping egg yolk and
Hollandaise sauce. His black hair gleamed and his eyes shone. His white shirt had
been fresh from its wrapping when Beevers had rolled up his sleeves and his soberly
striped bow tie was perfectly knotted. The dark blue suit jacket draped over the back
of his chair had a broad chalky stripe. He looked as though he expected to be standing
before the Supreme Court instead of the Vietnam Memorial.

“You’re still serious about that?” Pumo asked.

“Aren’t you? Tina, we need you—how could we do this without you?”

“You’re going to have to try,” Pumo said. “But isn’t the question academic anyhow?”

“Not to me, it isn’t,” Beevers said. “How about you, Conor? You think I’m just kidding
around?”

The three men at the table looked down the length of the living room toward Conor.
Startled at being the object of everyone’s attention, he straightened himself up.
“Not if you’re loaning me the air fare, you’re not,” he said. “Kidding, that is.”

Beevers was now quizzing Michael with his annoyingly clear, annoyingly amused eyes.
“And you?
Was sagen Sie
, Michael?”

“Do you ever exactly kid around, Harry?” Michael asked, unwilling to be a counter
in Harry Beevers’ newest game.

Beevers was still gleaming at him, waiting for more because he knew he was going to
get it.

“I suppose I’m tempted, Harry,” he said, and caught Pumo’s sidelong glance.

“Just out of curiosity,” Harry Beevers leaned forward to say to the cabdriver, “how
do the four of us strike you? What sort of impression do you have of us as a group?”

“You serious?” the cabbie asked, and turned to Poole, seated beside him on the front
seat. “Is this guy serious?”

Poole nodded, and Beevers said, “Go on. Lay it on the line. I’m curious.”

The driver looked at Beevers in the mirror, looked back at the road, then glanced
back over his shoulder at Pumo and Linklater. The driver was an unshaven, blubbery
man in his mid-fifties. Whenever he made even the smallest movement, Poole caught
the mingled odors of dried sweat and burning electrical circuits.

“You guys don’t fit together at all, no way,” the driver said. He looked suspiciously
over at Poole. “Hey, if this is ‘Candid Camera’ or some shit like that, you can get
out now.”

“What do you mean, we don’t fit together?” Beevers asked. “We’re a unit!”

“Here’s what
I
see.” The driver glanced again at his mirror. “You look like some kind of bigshot
lawyer, maybe a lobbyist or some other kind of guy who starts out in life by stealing
from the collection plate. The guy next to you looks like a pimp, and the guy next
to him is a working stiff with a hangover. This one here next to me, he looks like
he teaches high school.”

“A pimp!” Pumo howled.

“So sue me,” said the driver. “You asked.”

“I
am
a working stiff with a hangover,” Conor said. “And face it, Tina, you are a pimp.”

“I got it right, huh?” the driver said. “What do I win? You guys are from ‘Wheel of
Fortune,’ right?”

“Are you serious?” Beevers asked.

“I asked first,” said the driver.

“No, I wanted to know—” Beevers began, but Conor told him to shut up.

The cabdriver smirked to himself the rest of the way to Constitution Avenue. “This
is close enough,” Beevers said. “Pull over.”

“I thought you wanted the Memorial.”

“I said, pull over.”

The cabbie swerved to the side of the road and jerked to a stop. “Could you arrange
for me to meet Vanna White?” he asked into the mirror.

“Get stuffed,” Beevers said, and jumped out of the cab. “Pay him, Tina.” He held the
door until Pumo and Linklater left the car, then slammed it shut. “I hope you didn’t
tip that asshole,” he said.

Pumo shrugged.

“Then you’re an asshole too.” Beevers turned away and stomped off in the direction
of the Memorial.

Poole hurried to catch up with him.

“So what did I say?” Beevers asked, almost snarling. “I didn’t say anything wrong.
The guy was a jerk, that’s all. I should have kicked his teeth in.”

“Calm down, Harry.”

“You heard what he said to me, didn’t you?”

“He called Pumo a pimp,” Michael said.

“Tina’s a food pimp,” Beevers said.

“Slow down, or we’ll lose the others.”

Beevers whirled about to await Tina and Conor, who were about thirty feet behind.
Conor looked up and smiled at them.

Beevers tilted his head toward Michael and half-whispered, “Didn’t you ever get tired
of baby-sitting those two guys?” Then he yelled at Pumo, “Did you tip that shithead?”

Pumo kept a straight face. “A pittance.”

Poole said, “The cabdriver I got yesterday wanted to ask me how it felt to kill someone.”

“ ‘How does it feel to kill someone?’ ” Beevers said in a mocking, high-pitched voice.
“I can’t stand that question. Let them kill somebody, if they really want to find
out.” He felt better already. The other two came up to them. “Well, we know we’re
a unit anyway, don’t we?”

“We’re savage killers,” Pumo said.

Conor asked, “Who the fuck is Vanna White?” and Pumo cracked up.

*  *  *

By the time the four of them got within a hundred yards of the Memorial they were
part of a crowd. The men and women streaming from the sidewalk across the grass might
have been the same people Poole had seen the day before—vets wearing mismatched parts
of uniforms, older men in VFW garrison caps, women Poole’s age gripping the hands
of dazed-looking children. Harry Beevers’ chalk-striped lawyer’s suit made him look
like a frustrated, rather superior tour guide.

“What a bunch of losers we are, when you come down to it,” Beevers spoke into Poole’s
ear.

Poole said nothing—he was watching two men make their way across the grass. One, nearly
six-five and skinny as a pipe-stem, leaned against a metal crutch and in wide arcs
swung a rigid leg that must also have been metal; his bearded companion, imprisoned
in a wooden wheelchair, had to hoist his body off the seat every time he pushed the
wheels. The two men were calmly talking and laughing as they moved toward the Memorial.

“Did you find Cotton’s name yesterday?” Pumo asked, breaking into his thoughts in
a way that seemed to extend them.

Poole shook his head. “Let’s find him today.”

“Hell, let’s find everybody,” Conor said. “What else are we here for?”

Pumo listed all the names and their panel locations on the back of an American Express
slip. Dengler, 14 West, line 52—Poole remembered that one. Cotton, 13 West, line 73 … Trotman,
13 West, line 18. Peters, 14 West, line 38. And Huebsch, Hannapin, Recht. And Burrage,
Washington, Tiano. And Rowley, Thomas Chambers, the only man in their company killed
at Ia Thuc. And the victims of Elvis, the swivel-hipped sniper: Lowry, Montegna, Blevins.
And more after that. Pumo’s tiny, neat handwriting covered the back of the green American
Express slip.

They stood on the stone slabs of the path, looking up together at the names etched
into polished black granite. Conor wept before Dengler’s name, and both Conor and
Pumo had tears on their faces as they looked at the medic’s name:
PETERS, NORMAN CHARLES.

“Goddamn,” Conor said. “Right now, Peters ought to be on
top of a tractor, worried that he ain’t going to get enough rain.” Peters’ family
had worked the same Kansas farmland for four generations, and the medic had let everyone
know that while he temporarily enjoyed being their medical corpsman, sometimes in
the night he could smell his fields in Kansas. (“You be smelling Spitalny, not Kansas,”
SP4 Cotton said.) Now his brothers worked Peters’ fields, and whatever was left of
Peters, Norman Charles, after the helicopter on which he’d been giving plasma to Recht,
Herbert Wilson, had crashed and burned was beneath the doubtless fertile soil of a
country cemetery.

“He’d just be bitching about how the government is giving a royal screwing to him
and all the other farmers,” Beevers said.

Michael Poole saw a huge golden-fringed flag ruffling in the breeze off to his right,
and remembered glimpsing the same flag yesterday. A tall wild-haired man held the
flag anchored to his wide belt—beside him, nearly obscured by a glistening wreath,
stood a round white sign lettered in red:
NO GREATER LOVE.
Poole thought he’d read that the wild-haired ex-Marine had been standing in the same
place for two days straight.

“You see the story about that guy in the paper this morning?” Pumo said. “He’s holding
the flag in honor of POWs and MIAs.”

“It won’t bring them back any quicker,” Beevers said.

“I don’t think that’s the point,” Pumo told him.

In that instant, the long black length of the Memorial
announced
itself—to Poole it was as if it had just spoken and taken a step toward him. Michael
remembered this from his first visit. He moved very slightly away from the others.
The world was a blur. Once Poole had stood for hours up to his waist in water swarming
with leeches, holding his M-16 and his Claymores out of the water until his arms ached,
turned to lead, died.… Rowley, Thomas Chambers was standing beside him, also holding
his arsenal out of the stinking water. Swarms of mosquitos buzzed around them, settling
on their faces. Every few seconds they had to blow tickling mosquitos out of their
noses. Poole could remember being so tired that if Rowley had offered to prop up his
arms for him, he would have collapsed into sleep right there. He could remember feeling
the leeches attach themselves to his thighs.

“Oh God,” Poole said, realizing that he was trembling. He wiped his eyes and looked
at the others. Conor was weeping too, and emotion suffused Pumo’s handsome, normally
impassive face.

Harry Beevers was watching Poole. He looked about as emotional as a weight-guesser
at the state fair. “It got you, hmm?”