Koko (3 page)

Poole caught himself wiping the palms of his hands together, but it was too late to
wash away the Agent Orange.

How does it feel to kill somebody? I can’t tell you because I
can’t tell you. I think maybe I got killed myself, but not before I killed my son.
You shit in your pants, man, you laugh so hard.

By the time Michael Poole reached the park, the parade had melted down into a wandering
crowd, marchers and onlookers moving together across the grass. Loose, ragged groups
streamed over the entire landscape, walking through the sparse trees, filling the
whole scene. Though he could not see the Memorial, Michael knew where it was. About
a hundred yards before him, the crowds were moving down a grade into a natural bowl
from which came the psychic flare of too many people. The Memorial stood at the bottom
of all those people. Michael’s scalp tingled.

A phalanx of men in wheelchairs were pushing themselves across the long stretch of
grass before the bowl. One of the chairs tilted over sideways and a gaunt, black-haired,
legless man with a shockingly familiar face spilled out. Michael’s heart froze—the
man was Harry Beevers. Michael started to run forward to help. Then he checked himself.
The fallen man was surrounded by friends, and in any case he could not be Poole’s
old lieutenant. Two others righted the chair. They held it steady as the man braced
himself on his stumps. Then he pushed himself up onto the metal footrests. The man
reached up, grasped the armrests, and with neat gymnastic skill deposited himself
in his own seat.

The men in wheelchairs were gradually overtaken by the crowd. Michael looked around
him. All about were familiar faces which at second glance resolved into the faces
of strangers. Various large bearded versions of Tim Underhill were moving toward the
grassy bowl, also several wiry Denglers and Spitalnys. A beaming, round-faced Spanky
Burrage slapped the palm of a black man in a Special Forces hat. Poole wondered what
had happened to the dap, the complicated series of handgrips that blacks in Vietnam
used to greet one another. There had been a wonderful mixture of seriousness and poker-faced
hilarity about daps.

People streamed down into the bowl. Old women and babies clutched tiny flags. To Michael’s
right, two young men on crutches were followed by an old gaffer, his bald head factory-white,
with a row of medals pinned above the left pocket of his plaid shirt. Beside him a
florid septuagenarian in a VFW garrison cap struggled
with a shiny four-sided walker. Poole looked into the face of every man roughly his
own age, and found most of them looking back at him—a crossfire of frustrated recognitions.
He took a step forward across the trampled grass and looked straight ahead.

The Memorial was a long, intermittently visible line of sheer black tying together
the heads and bodies of the people before it. Men ranged all along its top, walking
along over its crew cut of grass as if pacing it off. Others lay down and leaned over
to trace names engraved in the polished stone. Poole moved several steps forward,
the crowded bowl in front of him widened and fell away, and the entire scene stood
before him.

The huge broken black wing of the Memorial was surrounded by people without being
engulfed by them. Poole imagined that it would take a lot to engulf this Memorial.
Pictures had not quite conveyed its scale. Its strength came from its mass. Only inches
high at the tapered ends, it rose to more than twice the height of a man at its folded
center. Separated from it by a foot or so of earth already sprouting little flags,
letters pinned to sticks, wreaths, and photographs of the dead, a sloping path of
granite blocks ran its length.

The people before this emphatic scar in the earth passed slowly before the increasingly
tall panels. Now and then they paused to lean forward and touch a name. Michael saw
a lot of embraces. A skinnier version of an unloved basic training sergeant was inserting
a handful of small red poppies one by one into the cracks between the panels. From
immediately in front of the Memorial, a large wedge-shaped crowd fanned upward into
the grassy bowl. A dense impacted wave of emotion came from all of these people.

Here was what was left of the war. The Vietnam War consisted of the names etched into
the Memorial and the crowd either passing back and forth before those names or standing
looking at them. For Poole, the actual country of Vietnam was now just another place—Vietnam
was many thousands of miles distant, with an embattled history and an idiosyncratic
and inaccessible culture. Its history and culture had briefly, disastrously intersected
ours. But the actual country of Vietnam was not
Vietnam;
that was here, in these American names and faces.

The ghost-Underhill had appeared beside Michael again, kneading one beefy shoulder
with bloody fingers—bright smears of insect blood across his tanned skin.
Ah, Lady Michael, they’re all good folks, they just let themselves get messed up by
the war
,
that’s all.
A dry chuckle.
We didn’t do that, did we, Lady Michael? We tend to be above it all, don’t we? Tell
me we do.

I thought I saw you smash in a car to get to a parking space, Poole said to this imaginary
Tim Underhill.

I only smash up cars on paper.

Underhill, did you kill those people in Singapore and Bangkok? Did you put the Koko
cards on their bodies?

I don’t think you’d better pin that one on me, Lady Michael.

“Airborne!” someone shouted.

“Airborne all the way!” someone else shouted back.

Poole worked his way closer to the Memorial through the mostly stationary crowd. The
sergeant who looked like his old sergeant from Fort Sill was now slipping the tiny
red poppies into the crack between the last two tall panels. Protruding from between
the panels, the little poppies reflected twice, so that two black shadows lay behind
each red dart. A big wild-haired man held up a Texas-sized flag with a waving golden
fringe. Poole stepped up beside a Mexican family posted directly beside the granite
walk and for the first time saw the reflection in the tall black panel. Mirrored people
streamed before him. The reflections of the Mexican family, a man and a woman, a pair
of teenage girls, and a small boy holding a flag, all stared at the same spot on the
wall. Between them, the reflected parents held a framed photograph of a young Marine.
Poole’s own uptilted head seemed, like the others, to be searching for a specific
name. Then, as in an optical illusion, the real Poole saw names leap out from the
black wall. Donald Z. Pavel, Melvin O. Elvan, Dwight T. Pouncefoot. He looked at the
next panel. Art A. McCartney, Cyril P. Downtain, Masters J. Robinson, Billy Lee Barnhart,
Paul P.J. Bedrock. Howard X. Hoppe. Bruce G. Hyssop. All the names seemed strange
and familiar, in equal measure.

Someone behind him said “Alpha Papa Charlie,” and Michael turned his head, his ears
tingling. Now people completely filled the shallow bowl. They covered the rise behind
it. Alpha Papa Charlie. Without asking, there was no way of telling which of the men,
white-haired, bald, pony-tailed, with faces clear and pockmarked, seamed and scarred,
electric with feeling, had spoken. From a huddle of four or five men in jungle hats
and green jackets came another, rougher voice saying “… lost him outside Da Nang.”

Da Nang. That was in I Corps,
his
Vietnam. For a moment
or two there Poole could not move his arms or legs. Into him streamed place names
he had not remembered for fourteen years—Chu Lai, Tam Ky. Poole saw a narrow dirt
alleyway behind a row of huts; he smelled the clumps of drying marijuana hanging from
the ceiling of a lean- to where a mama-san with the irresistible name of Si Van Vo
lived and prospered. The Dragon Valley, oh God. Phu Bai, LZ Sue, Hue, Quang Tri. Alpha
Papa Charlie. On the other side of a collection of thatched huts a line of water buffalos
moved across a mud plain toward a mountain trail. Millions of bugs darkened the humid
air. Marble Mountain. All those charming little places between the Annamese Cordillera
and the South China Sea, where the dead SP4 Cotton, killed by a sniper named Elvis,
had lazily spun in frothing pink water. The A Shau Valley: yea, though I walk …

Yea, though I walk through the A Shau Valley, I shall fear no evil. Michael could
see M.O. Dengler bouncing along a high narrow trail, grinning over his shoulder at
him, blivets and ammunition strung across his back. On the other side of Dengler’s
joyous face was a green, unfolding landscape of unbelievable depth and delicacy, plunging
thousands of feet into mists, shading into dozens of different shades of green and
rolling on all the way to a green, heavenly infinity.
You been bad?
Dengler had just asked him.
If you haven’t you ain’t got nothin’ to worry about. Yea, though I walk through the
A Shau Valley …

Poole finally realized he was weeping.

“Polish on both sides, yeah,” said an old woman’s voice quite near him. Poole wiped
his eyes, but they filled again, so quickly he saw nothing but colorful blurs. “Whole
neighborhood was Polish, both sides, up and down. Tom’s father was in the Big One,
but the emphysema kept him home today.” Poole took his handkerchief out of his pocket
and pressed it to his eyes and tried to bring his crying under control. “I said, old
man, you can do what you like but nothin’ is gonna keep me away from DC, come Veteran’s
Day. Don’t you worry, son, nobody here minds if you cry your eyes out.”

Poole slowly realized that this last comment had been directed at him. He lowered
his handkerchief. An obese white-haired woman in her sixties was looking at him with
grandmotherly concern. Next to her stood a black man in a faded Special Forces jacket,
an Anzac hat astride an unruly Afro.

“Thanks,” Poole said. “This thing”—he gestured behind him at the Memorial—“finally
got to me.”

The black ex-soldier nodded.

“Actually, I heard somebody say something, can’t even remember what it was now …”

“Yeah, me too,” said the black man. “I heard somebody say ‘about twenty klicks from
An Khe,’ and I … my damn
stomach
just disappeared.”

“II Corps,” Michael said. “You were a little south of me. Name’s Michael Poole, nice
to meet you.”

“Bill Pierce.” The two men shook hands. “This lady here is Florence Majeski. Her son
was in my unit.”

Poole had a strong, sudden desire to put his arms around the old woman, but he knew
that he would break down again if he did that. He asked the first question that came
to mind: “You get that hat off an ARVN?”

Pierce grinned. “Snatched it right off, riding by in a jeep. Poor little bastard.”

Then he knew what he really wanted to ask Pierce. “How can you find the names you’re
looking for, in all this crowd?”

“There’s Marines at both ends of the Memorial,” Pierce said, “and they have books
with all the names and the panels they’re on. Or you could ask one of the yellow caps.
They’re just here today, on account of all the extra people.” Pierce glanced at Mrs.
Majeski.

“They had Tom right there in the book,” the old lady said.

“I see one over thataway,” Pierce said, pointing off to Michael’s right. “He’ll find
it for you.” In the midst of a little knot of people, a tall, bearded, young white
man in a yellow duckbill cap was consulting sheets in a looseleaf binder and then
gesturing toward specific panels.

“God bless you, son,” said Mrs. Majeski. “If you’re ever in Ironton, Pennsylvania,
I want you to stop in and pay us a visit.”

“Good luck,” Pierce said.

“Same to both of you.” He smiled and turned away.

“I mean it now!” Mrs. Majeski yelled. “You stop in and see us!”

Michael waved, and moved toward the man in the yellow cap. At least two dozen people
had him circled, and all seemed to be leaning toward him. “I can only handle one at
a time,” the man with the cap said in a flat Midwestern voice. “Please, okay?”

Poole thought, The others ought to be at the hotel by now. This is a ridiculous gesture.

The young man in the yellow cap consulted his pages, indicated panels, wiped moisture
from his forehead. Michael soon stood before him. The volunteer was wearing blue jeans
and a
denim shirt unsnapped halfway down over a damp grey T-shirt. His beard glistened with
sweat. “Name,” he said.

“M.O. Dengler,” Poole said.

The man riffled through his pages, located the D’s, and ran his finger down a column.
“Here we go. The only Dengler is Dengler, Manuel Orosco, of Wisconsin. Which happens
to be my home state. Panel fourteen west, line fifty-two. Right over there.” He pointed
to the right. Small poppies like red pinpoints dotted the edges of the panel, before
which stood a large unmoving crowd.
NO MORE
VIETNAMS
, announced a bright blue banner.

Manuel Orosco Dengler?
The Spanish names were a surprise. A sudden thought stopped Michael as he made his
way toward the blue banner through the crowd: the guide had given him the wrong Dengler.
Then he remembered that the guide had said that his was the only Dengler. And the
initials were right. Manuel Orosco had to be his Dengler.

Poole was directly in front of the Memorial once again. His shoulder touched the shoulder
of a shaggy-haired, weeping vet with a handlebar moustache. Beside him a woman with
white blonde hair to the waist of her blue jeans held the hand of a little girl, also
blonde. A child without a father, as he was now forever a father without a child.
On the other side of the broken strip of sod, planted with flags and wreaths and photographs
of young soldiers stapled to wooden sticks, the fourteenth panel, west, loomed before
him. Poole counted down until he reached the fifty-second line. The name of M.O. Dengler,
MANUEL OROSCO DENGLER
, etched in black polished granite, jumped out at him. Poole admired the surgical
dignity of the engraving, the unadorned clarity of the letters. He knew that he had
never had any choice about standing in front of Dengler’s name.