Koko (23 page)

“I guess,” he admitted. “How do you know about it though, Maggie?”

“Everybody
knows about it, Tina,” she said. “Except a surprising number of middle-aged American
men, who really do believe that people can start fresh all over again, that the past
dies and the future is a new beginning, and that these beliefs are moral.”

Now Pumo carefully left his bed. Maggie did not stir, and her breathing went on quietly
and steadily. He had to look at his desk to see if he was right about what had been
stolen. Pumo’s heart was still pounding, and his own breathing sounded very loud to
him. He proceeded cautiously across the bedroom in the dark. When he put his hand
on the doorknob, he was visited by the sudden image of Dracula standing just on the
other side of the door. Sweat broke out on his face.

“Tina?” Maggie’s crystalline voice floated on a dead-level current of breath from
the bedroom.

Pumo stood in the dark empty hallway. No one was there—as if Maggie had helped dispel
the threat.

“I know what’s missing,” he said. “I have to check it out. Sorry I woke you up.”

“It’s okay,” Maggie said.

His head pounded, and he could still feel little tremors in his
knees. If he stood in that spot any longer, Maggie would know something was wrong.
She might even feel that she had to get out of bed to help him. Pumo moved down the
hall into the loft’s living room and pulled the cord that switched on the overhead
lights. Like most rooms used almost entirely in the daytime, when seen this late at
night Pumo’s living room had an eerie quality, as if everything in it had been replaced
by an exact replica of itself. Pumo went across the room, up the steps to the platform,
and sat down at his desk.

He could not see it. He looked beneath the telephone and the answering machine. He
moved the checkbooks to one side and lifted stacks of invoices and receipts. He checked
behind a box of rubber bands and moved a box of tissues. Nothing. It could not have
been hidden by the bottles of vitamins beside the electric pencil sharpener, nor by
the two boxes of Blackwing pencils beside that. He was right: it wasn’t there. It
had been stolen.

To be certain, Pumo looked under his desk, leaned over the top and looked behind it,
and then poked through his wastebasket. The wastebasket contained lots of balled-up
tissues, an old copy of the
Village Voice
, the wrapper from a Quaker Oats Granola Bar, begging-letters from charities, grocery
coupons, several unopened envelopes covered with announcements that he had already
won a valuable prize, and a cotton ball and sealer from a bottle of vitamins.

Crouching beside the wastebasket, Pumo looked up and saw Maggie standing in the entrance
to the living room. Her arms dangled at her sides and her face still seemed full of
sleep.

“I know I look a little crazy,” he said, “but I was right.”

“What is missing?”

“I’ll tell you after I think about it for a couple of seconds.”

“That bad?”

“I don’t know yet.” He stood up. His body felt very tired, his mind not at all. He
came down from the platform and went toward her.

“Nothing’s that bad,” she said.

“I was just thinking about a guy named M.O. Dengler.”

“The one who died in Bangkok.”

When he reached her he took one of her hands and opened it, like a leaf, on his own
hand. Seen like this, her hand looked normal, not at all knobby. Lots of tiny wrinkles
criss-crossed her palm. Maggie’s fingers were small, slim as cigarettes, slightly
curled.

“Bangkok would be a filthy place to die,” she said. “I loathe Bangkok.”

“I didn’t know you’d ever been there.” He turned her hand over. Her palm was almost
pink, but the back of her hand was the same golden color as the rest of her. Maybe
the joints of her hand were slightly larger than one would expect. Maybe the bones
of her wrist protruded.

“You don’t know much about me,” Maggie said.

They both knew he was going to tell her what had been stolen from his desk, and that
this conversation was only a period in which Pumo could digest the fact of its loss.

“Have you ever been to Australia?”

“Lots of times.” She gave him a look of mock disgust disguised as no expression at
all. “I suppose you went there on R&R and spent seven days seeking sexual release
in an alcoholic blur.”

“Sure,” Pumo said. “I was under orders.”

“Can we turn off the lights and go back to sleep?”

Pumo astonished himself by yawning. He reached up and pulled the cord, putting them
in darkness.

She led him back down the narrow corridor and into the bedroom. Pumo groped his way
to his side of the bed and climbed in. He felt more than saw Maggie roll onto her
side and prop herself up on one elbow. “Tell me about M.O. Dengler,” she said.

He hesitated, and then a sentence appeared fully-formed in his mind, and when he spoke
it, other sentences followed, as if they were appearing of their own will. “We were
in a kind of swampy field. It was about six o’clock in the afternoon, and we’d been
out since maybe five that morning. Everybody was pissed off, because we had wasted
the whole day, and we were hungry, and we could tell the new lieutenant had no idea
what he was doing. He had just come in two days before, and he was trying to impress
us with how sharp he was. This was Beevers.”

“Could have fooled me,” said Maggie.

“What he did was take us off into the wilderness on an all-day wild goose chase. What
the old lieutenant would have done, what was supposed to happen, was that we got set
down in the LZ, poked around for a while to see if we could find anybody to shoot
at, then we’d go back to the LZ for lift out. If you got some action, you call in
an air strike or you call in artillery or you shoot it out, whatever’s right. You
respond. That’s all we were there for—we were just there to respond. They sent us
out there to get shot at so that we could shoot back and kill a lot of folks. That
was it. It was pretty simple, when you come right down to it.

“But this new guy, Beans Beevers, acted like … You knew you were in trouble. Because
in order to respond, you have to
know what’s out there that you are responding
to.
And this new guy who was fresh out of ROTC at some fancy college acts like he’s in
an old movie or something. Inside his head, he’s already a hero. He’s gonna capture
Ho Chi Minh, he’s gonna wipe out a whole enemy division, there’s a Medal of Honor
already minted with his name on the certificate. He’s got that look.”

“When do we get to M.O. Dengler?” Maggie asked softly.

Pumo laughed. “Right now, I guess. The point is, our new lieutenant took us way out
of our area without knowing it. He got so excited he misread his map, and so Poole
kept sending the wrong coordinates back to base. We even lost our F.D., which
nobody
does. We’re supposed to be getting back to the LZ, and nothing around us looks familiar.
Poole says, ‘Lieutenant, I’ve been looking at my map, and I think we must be in Dragon
Valley.’ Beevers tells him he’s absolutely wrong, and to keep his mouth shut if he
wants to stay out of trouble. ‘Watch out, you might get sent to Vietnam,’ Underhill
says, which really begins to piss off the lieutenant.

“So instead of confessing that he was wrong and making some kind of joke about it
and getting the hell out, which would have saved everything, he makes the mistake
of thinking about it. And unfortunately there’s a lot to think about. An entire company
had been shot to pieces in Dragon Valley the week before, and the Tin Man was supposed
to be cooking up some combined action. Beevers decides that since we’re supposed to
provoke action and respond to it, and since we had providentially found ourselves
in what might be the perfect place for action, we ought to provoke a little of it.
We’ll advance into the Valley a little, he says, and Poole asks if he can figure out
our real coordinates and radio them in. Radio silence, Beevers says, and shuts
him
up. Poole is supposed to be chicken-hearted, get it?

“Beevers is thinking that we might spot a few Viet Cong, or maybe a small NVA detachment,
which is what’s supposed to be down there, and if we’re lucky shoot the crap out of
them and get a respectable body count, and go back with our new lieutenant blooded.
Well, by the time we got back he was blooded, all right. He signals us to continue
moving into the Valley, see, and everybody but him knows this is totally crazy. A
creep named Spitalny asks how long we were gonna keep this up, and Beevers yells back,
‘
As long as it takes! This isn’t boy scout camp!’
Dengler says to me, ‘I love this new lieutenant,’ and I see he’s grinning like a
boy with a big piece of pie. Dengler has never seen anything like this new lieutenant
before. He and Underhill are cracking up.

“Finally we get to this thing like a swampy field. It’s just getting dark. The air’s
full of bugs. The joke, if it is a joke, is over. Everybody’s beat. On the far side
of the field is a stand of trees that looks like the beginning of jungle. There are
a few bare dead logs in the middle of the field, and some big shell holes full of
water.

“I got a funny feeling the minute I laid eyes on the field. It looked like death.
That’s the best I can say. It looked like a goddamned graveyard. It had that fixin’-to-die
smell—maybe you know what I mean. I bet if you go to the pound and get into that room
where they kill the dogs nobody wants, you’d get that same smell. Then I saw a helmet
liner lying out next to a shell crater. A little way off from it I saw the busted-off
stock of an M-16.

“ ‘Suppose we explore this piece of real estate and see what’s on the other side before
we go back to camp,’ Beevers said. ‘Looks good, doesn’t it?’

“ ‘Lieutenant,’ Poole said, ‘I think this field is probably mined.’ He saw what
I
did, see?

“ ‘Do you?’ Beevers asked. ‘Then why don’t you go out there first, Poole? You just
volunteered to be our point man.’

“Fortunately, Poole and I weren’t the only ones who had seen the helmet liner and
the stock. They wouldn’t let Poole go out there by himself, and they weren’t about
to try it for themselves either.

“ ‘You think this field is mined?’ Beevers asked.”

“You men think this field is mined?” screamed Lieutenant Beevers. “You actually think
I’ll fall for that one? This is a struggle for command, and like it or not, I’m in
command here
.”

Grinning, Dengler turned to Puma and whispered, “Don’t you love the way his mind works
?”

“Dengler whispered something to me, and Beevers blew up. ‘Okay,’ he yelled at Dengler,
‘if you think this area is mined, prove it to me. Throw something out there and hit
a mine. If nothing blows up, we all go into the field.’ ‘Whatever you say,’ Dengler
said—”

“As the lieutenant wishes,” Dengler said, and looked around him in the gloom. “Throw
the lieutenant,” Victor Spitalny muttered. Dengler saw a good-sized rock buried in
the muck
near him, pushed it free with his boot, bent down, put his arms around it, and lifted
it.

“—and he picked up a rock about the size of his head. Beevers was getting madder by
the second. He told Dengler to heave the goddamned thing out into the field, and Poole
came up next to Dengler to take half the weight. They did a one-two-three and heaved
the thing maybe twenty yards. Everybody but the lieutenant fell down and covered his
face. I heard the rock land with a thud. Nothing. I think we all expected a pressure
mine to send shrapnel off in all directions. When nothing happened, we picked ourselves
up. Beevers was standing there smirking. ‘Well, girls,’ he said. ‘Satisfied now? Need
more proof?’ And then he did an amazing thing—he took off his helmet and kissed it.
‘Follow this, it has more balls than you do,’ he said, and he cocked his arm back
and tossed his helmet as far as he could out into the field. We all watched it sail
up. By the time it started to descend, we could hardly see it anymore.”

They watched the lieutenant’s helmet disappear into the grey air and the swarming
bugs. By the time the helmet hit the ground it was nearly invisible. The explosion
surprised them all, except at that level where they could no longer be surprised by
anything. Again, all except Beevers flopped into the muck. A column of red fire flashed
upward and the ground bounced under their feet. Set off either by a malfunction or
by the vibration, another mine detonated a beat after the first, and a chunk of metal
whizzed past Beevers’ face, so close he could feel its heat. He either fell down on
purpose or collapsed in shock next to Poole. He was panting. Everyone in the platoon
could smell the acrid stink of the two explosions. For a moment everything was still.
Tina Pumo lifted his head, half-expecting another of the mines to go off, and as he
did so he heard the insects begin their drilling again. For a moment Tina thought
he could see Lieutenant Beevers’ helmet out on the far end of the mined field, lying
miraculously undamaged though somehow stuffed with leaves beside a twisted branch.
Then he saw that the leaves formed a pattern of eyes and eyebrows inside the helmet.
Finally he saw that they were real eyes and eyebrows. The helmet was still on a dead
soldier’s head. What he had taken for a branch was a severed arm in a sleeve. The
explosion had unearthed a partially buried and dismembered corpse.

From the other end of the field a loud inquisitive voice
called out in Vietnamese. Another voice screeched in laughter, and joyfully shouted
back.

“I think we’re in a situation here, Lieutenant,” Dengler whispered. Poole had taken
his map out of its wax case and was running his fingers along trails, trying to figure
out exactly where they were.

Looking across the field at the American head which had floated in its American helmet
out of the substance of the field, Poole saw a series of abrupt, inexplicable movements
of the earth—as if invisible rodents tore around, roiling the sodden earth here, tossing
spears of grass there. Something trembled the log near the field’s far end and pushed
it backwards an inch or two. Then he finally realized that the platoon was being fired
on from the rear.