Koko (2 page)

He
wanted
to see people he had known over there, that was the large simple truth. He wanted
a great grand reunion with everyone he had ever seen in Vietnam, living or dead. And
he wanted to see the Memorial—in fact Poole wanted to love the Memorial. He was almost
afraid to see it. From the pictures he had seen, the Memorial was beautiful, strong
and stark, and brooding. That would be a Memorial worth loving. The only memorial
he’d ever expected to have was a memorial to separateness, but it belonged to him
and to the cowboys out in the parking
lot, because they were forever distinct, as the dead were finally distinct. Together
they were all so distinct that to Poole they almost felt like a secret country of
their own.

There were names he wanted to find on the Memorial, names that stood in place of his
own.

The big cowboy had taken a slip of paper from his shirt pocket and was writing, bent
halfway over the hood of the van. The others unloaded duffel bags from the back of
the van. The Jack Daniel’s bottle circulated until the driver took a last slug and
eased it into one of the bags.

Now Michael wanted to be outside, to be moving. According to the schedule he had picked
up at the registration desk downstairs, the parade up Constitution Avenue had already
begun. By the time he had his first look at the Memorial and came back, the others
would have checked in.

Unless, that is, Harry Beevers had managed to get drunk at the bar of Tina Pumo’s
restaurant and was still asking for one more vodka martini, one more little teeny
martooni, we’ll catch the five o’clock shuttle instead of the four o’clock, or the
six o’clock, or the seven. Tina Pumo, the only one of the old group Poole saw with
anything like regularity, had told him that Beevers sometimes spent all afternoon
in his place. Poole’s only contact with Harry Beevers in four or five years had come
three months before, when Beevers had called him up to read aloud a
Stars and Stripes
article, sent to Beevers by his brother, about a series of random murders committed
in the Far East by someone who identified himself as Koko.

Poole stepped back from the window. It was not time for Koko, now. The giant in tiger
stripes and jungle hat finished putting his note under one of the Camaro’s windshield
wipers. What could it say?
Sorry I beat up your car, man, come around for a shot of Jack—

Poole sat down on the edge of the bed, picked up the receiver, and after a second
of hesitation dialed Judy’s number at school.

When she answered he said, “Well, I’m here, but the other guys haven’t checked in
yet.”

“Do you want me to say, ‘Poor Michael’?” asked Judy.

“No, I thought you’d like to know what’s going on.”

“Look, Michael, is something special on your mind? This conversation has no point.
You’re going to spend a couple of days going all drunk and sentimental with your old
army buddies. Do I have any place in that? I’d just make you feel guilty.”

“I still wish you’d have come along.”

“I think the past is in the past because that’s where it belongs. Does that tell you
anything?”

“I guess it does,” Michael said. There was a moment of silence that went on too long.
She would not speak until he did. “Okay,” Michael finally said. “I’ll probably see
Beevers and Tina Pumo and Conor tonight, and there are some ceremonies I’d like to
take part in tomorrow. I’ll get home Sunday about five or six, I suppose.”

“Your patients are extremely understanding.”

“Diaper rash is rarely fatal,” Michael said, and Judy uttered a smoky exhalation that
might have been laughter.

“Should I call you tomorrow?”

“Don’t bother. It’s nice, but don’t bother, really.”

“Really,” Michael said, and hung up.

Michael moved slowly through the Sheraton’s lobby looking at the men lined up at the
registration desk, among them the big cowboy in tiger-stripe fatigues and his three
buddies, and the groups of people sitting on padded dark green chairs and banquettes.
The Sheraton was one of those hotels with no true bar. Women in clinging, filmy dresses
brought drinks to the twenty or thirty tables in the sunken lobby. The waitresses
all seemed to have descended from the same tall, languid, handsome family. Where these
princesses might normally have served gin-and-tonics and Perriers-and-lime to men
with dark suits and power haircuts—to men like Michael Poole’s neighbors in Westchester
County—now they set down shots of tequila and bottles of beer before wildmen in battle
jackets and bush hats, in funky fatigues and funkier khaki ballcaps.

The sulphurous conversation with his wife made Michael want to sit down among the
wildmen and order a drink. But if he sat down, he would be drawn into things. Someone
would begin to talk to him. He would buy a drink for a man who had been in some of
the same places he had been, or had been near the places he had been, or who had a
friend who had been near those places. Then the man would buy him a drink. This would
lead to stories,
memories, theories, introductions, vows of brotherhood. Eventually he would join the
parade as part of a gang of strangers and see the Memorial through the thick insulating
comfort of alcohol. Michael kept moving.

“Cavalry all the way!” shouted a whiskey voice behind his back.

Michael went through a side door out into the parking lot. It was just a little too
cold for his tweed jacket and sweater, but he decided not to go back upstairs for
his coat. The heavy billowing sky threatened rain, but Michael decided that he didn’t
much care if it rained.

Cars streamed up the ramp from the street. Florida license plates, Texas plates, Iowa
and Kansas and Alabama, every kind and make of vehicle, from hardcore GM pickups to
tinny Japanese imports. The van cowboy and his friends had driven to Washington from
New Jersey, the Garden State. Tucked beneath the Camaro’s windshield wiper was the
note:
You were in my way so FUCK YA!!!

Down on the street, Michael flagged a cab and asked the driver to take him to Constitution
Avenue.

“You gonna walk in the parade?” the driver immediately asked.

“That’s right.”

“You’re a vet, you were over there?”

“That’s right.” Michael looked up. From the back, the cabdriver could have been one
of the earnest, desperate, slightly crazed students doomed to flunk out of medical
school: colorless plastic glasses, dishwater hair, pale youthful skin. His ID plate
said that his name was Thomas Strack. Blood from an enormous pimple had dried on the
collar of his shirt.

“You ever in combat? Like in a firefight or something?”

“Now and then.”

“There’s somethin’ I always wanted to ask—I hope you don’t take no offense or nothing.”

Michael knew what the cabdriver was going to ask. “If you don’t want me to take offense,
don’t ask an offensive question.”

“Okay.” The driver turned his head to glance at Michael, then looked straight ahead
again. “Okay, no need to get heavy.”

“I can’t tell you how it feels to kill someone,” Michael said.

“You mean you never did it.”

“No, I mean I can’t tell you.”

The cabbie drove the rest of the way in boiling silence. You
coulda told me something. Gimme a little gore, why don’t you? Lemme see that good
old guilt, lemme see that fine old rapture. The past is in the past because that’s
where it belongs. Don’t bother, really. You were in my way, so fuck ya.

I’ll take a triple Finlandia martini on the rocks, please, hold the olives, hold the
vermouth, please, hold the rocks, please, and get the same thing for my four hundred
buddies in here, please. They might look a little funny, but they’re my tribe.

“This okay?” the cabbie asked. Beside the car was a wall of people. Michael could
see flags and men carrying banners suspended between poles. He paid the driver and
left the cab.

Michael could see over the heads of most of the people lining the sidewalk. Here the
tribe had gathered, all right. Men who had once been soldiers, most of them dressed
as though they were still soldiers, filled the width of Constitution Avenue. In platoon-sized
groups interspersed with high school bands, they marched raggedly down the street.
Other people stood on the sidewalk and watched them go by because they approved of
what they were, what they meant because of what they had done. By standing there the
bystanders applauded. Until now, Michael realized, he had resisted fully believing
in the reality of this parade.

It was not ticker tape and limousines on Fifth Avenue—the Iranian hostages had been
given that one—but in most ways this was better, being more inclusive, less euphoric
but more emotional. Michael edged through the people on the sidewalk. He stepped off
the curb and fell in behind the nearest large and irregular group. Surprised tears
instantly filled his eyes.

The men before him were three-fourths jungle fighters with everything but Claymores
and M-16s, and one-fourth pudgy WWII vets who looked like ex-boxers. Michael realized
that the sun had come out only when he saw their long shadows stretching out to him
on the street.

He could see Tim Underhill, another long shadow, striding along with his belly before
him and cigar smoke drifting in his wake. In his mind, Underhill was muttering obscene
hilarious remarks about everyone in sight and wearing his summer uniform of a bandanna
and blousy fatigue pants. A streak of mosquito blood was smeared across his left shoulder.

In spite of everything, Michael wished that Underhill were beside him now. Michael
realized that he had been considering Underhill—not brooding or thinking about him,
considering
him—since Harry Beevers had called him up at the end of October to tell him about
the newspaper articles his brother had sent him from Okinawa.

In two separate incidents, three people, an English tourist in his early forties and
an older American couple, had been murdered in Singapore just about the time the Iranian
hostages had returned to America. The murders were thought to have been committed
at least a week to ten days apart. The Englishman’s body was found on the grounds
of the Goodwood Park hotel, those of the American couple in a vacant bungalow in the
Orchard Road section of the city. All three bodies had been mutilated, and on two
of them had been found playing cards scrawled with an unusual and enigmatic name:
Koko. Six months later, in the summer of 1981, two French journalists were found similarly
mutilated in their Bangkok hotel room. Playing cards with the same name had been placed
on the bodies. The only difference between these killings and those that had happened
after Ia Thuc, a decade and a half earlier, was that the cards were not regimental,
but ordinary commercial playing cards.

Michael thought Underhill lived in Singapore. At least Underhill had always claimed
that he was going to move there after he got out of the army. But Poole could not
make the mental leap required to convict Tim Underhill of murder.

Poole had known two extraordinary human beings during his time in Vietnam, two men
who had stood out as exceptionally worthy of respect and affection in the half-circus,
half-laboratory of human behavior that a longstanding combat unit becomes. Tim Underhill
was one, and a boy from Milwaukee named M.O. Dengler was the other. The bravest people
he had ever known, Underhill and little Dengler had seemed perfectly at home in Vietnam.

Tim Underhill had gotten himself back to the Far East as soon as possible after the
war and had become a moderately successful crime novelist. M.O. Dengler was killed
in a freakish street accident while on R&R in Bangkok with another soldier, named
Victor Spitalny, and never returned from Asia at all.

Oh, Michael Poole missed Underhill. He missed them both, Underhill and Dengler.

The group of vets behind Michael, as scattered and varied as those before him, gradually
caught up with him. He became aware that he was no longer marching alone, but was
moving along between the crowds lining both sides of the street with a
couple Dengler-sized boonie-rats, fiercely moustached, and an assortment of polyester-suited
VFW types.

As if he had been reading his thoughts, one of the Denglersized boonie-rats walking
beside Michael sidled up to him and whispered something. Michael bent down, cupping
his ear.

“I was a hell of a fighter, man,” the little ex-soldier whispered a shade louder.
Tears gleamed in his eyes.

“To tell you the truth,” Michael said, “you remind me of one of the best soldiers
I ever knew.”

“No shit.” The man nodded briskly. “What outfit was you in?”

Poole named his division and his battalion.

“What year?” The man cocked his head to check out Poole’s face.

“ ‘Sixty-eight,’ sixty-nine.”

“Ia Thuc,” the boonie-rat said immediately. “I remember that. That was you guys, right?
Time
magazine and all that shit?”

Poole nodded.

“Fuckin’-A. They shoulda give that Lieutenant Beevers a fuckin’ Medal of Honor for
what he done, and then took it away again for shootin’ off his mouth in front of fuckin’
journalists,” the boonie-rat said, sidling away with an easy fluid motion that would
have been noiseless if they had been walking over brittle twigs.

Two fat women with short fluffy hair, pastel pantsuits, and placid church-picnic faces
were rhythmically waving between them a red banner with the stark black letters
POW-MIA.
A few paces behind marched two youngish ex-soldiers bearing another banner:
COMPENSATE FOR AGENT ORANGE
.
Agent Orange—

Victor Spitalny had tilted his head and stuck out his tongue, claiming that the stuff
tasted good.
You motherfuckers, drink it down! This shit’s boo-koo good for your insides!
Washington and Spanky Burrage and Trotman, the black soldiers on the detail, cracked
up, falling into the thick jungly growth beside the trail, slapping each other on
the back and sides, repeating “boo-koo good for your insides” and enraging Spitalny,
whom they knew had only been trying, in his stupid way, to be funny. The smell of
Agent Orange, halfway between gasoline and industrial solvent, stuck to all of them
until sweat and insect repellent and trail grime either covered it up or washed it
off.