Koko (8 page)

“That’s an amazingly interesting idea,” Beevers said.

“Request permission to move,
sir
,” Conor barked. Beevers glared at him. Conor stood up, clapped Michael on the shoulder,
and said, “Do you know what time it is when darkness falls, bats fill the air, and
wild dogs begin to howl?”

Poole was looking up in friendly amusement, Harry Beevers—pencil frozen halfway to
his mouth—with irritation and incredulity.

Conor leaned toward Beevers and winked. “Time for another beer.” He took a dripping
bottle from the ice bucket and twisted off the cap. Beevers was still glaring at him.
“So the lieutenant
thinks we ought to send a little search party after Underhill, check him out, see
how crazy he is?”

“Well, Conor, since you ask,” Beevers said very lightly and quietly, “something along
those lines might be possible.”

“Actually go there?” Pumo asked.

“You said it first.”

Conor poured nearly half of the beer down his throat in a continuous series of swallows.
He smacked his lips. Conor returned to his chair and took another slug of the beer.
Things had just gone totally out of control—now he could sit back and relax and wait
for everybody else to see it.

If the Lost Boss says that he still considers himself Underhill’s lieutenant, Conor
thought, I am gonna puke.

Beevers said, “I don’t know if you want to call this a moral responsibility or not,
but I think we should handle this situation ourselves. We knew the man, we were there.”

Conor opened his mouth, swallowed air, and let the pressure build on his diaphragm.
After a second or two he emitted a resounding burp.

“I’m not asking you to share my sense of responsibility,” Beevers said, “but it would
be nice if you could stop being childish.”

“How can I go to Singapore, for Chrissakes?” Conor yelled. “I don’t have money in
the bank to go around the block! I spent all my money on the fare here, man. I’m sleeping
on Tina’s couch because I can’t even afford a room at my own reunion, man. Get serious,
okay?”

Conor felt immediately embarrassed at blowing up in front of Mike Poole. This was
what happened when he went over his limit and got drunk—he got mad too fast. Without
making himself sound like an even bigger fool, he wanted to explain things. “I mean—okay,
I’m an asshole, I shouldn’t ought to of yelled. But I’m not like the rest of you guys,
I’m not a doctor or a lawyer or an Indian chief, I’m broke, man, I used to be part
of the old poor and now I’m part of the new poor. I’m down at sore heels.”

“Well, I’m no millionaire,” Beevers said. “In fact, as of several weeks ago I resigned
from Caldwell, Moran, Morrissey. There were a lot of complicated factors involved,
but the fact is, I’m out of a job.”

“Your wife’s own brother gave you a pink slip?” Conor asked.

“I resigned,” Beevers said. “Pat is my ex-wife. Serious differences
of opinion came up between myself and Charles Caldwell. Anyhow, I’m not made of money
any more than you are, Conor. But I did negotiate a pretty decent golden handshake
for myself, and I’d be more than willing to loan you a couple thousand dollars interest-free,
to be repaid at your convenience. That ought to take care of you.”

“I’d help out too,” Poole said. “I’m not agreeing to anything, Harry, but Underhill
shouldn’t be hard to find. He must get advances and royalties from his publisher.
Maybe they even forward fan mail to him. I bet we could learn Underhill’s address
with one phone call.”

“I can’t believe this,” said Pumo. “All three of you guys just lost your minds.”

“You were the first to say you’d go,” Conor reminded him.

“I can’t run out on my life for a month. I have a restaurant to run.”

Pumo hadn’t noticed when everything went out of control. Okay, Conor thought, Singapore,
what the hell?

“Tina, we need you.”

“I need me more than you do. Count me out.”

“If you stay behind, you’ll be sorry the rest of your life.”

“Jesus, Harry, in the morning this is going to sound like an Abbott and Costello movie.
What the hell do you think you’re going to do if you ever manage to find him?”

Pumo wants to stay around New York and play games with Maggie Lah, Conor thought.

“Well, we’ll see,” Beevers said.

Conor lobbed his empty beer bottle toward the wastebasket. The bottle fell three feet
short and slanted off under the dresser. He could not remember switching from vodka
to beer. Or had he started on beer, then gone to vodka, and switched back to beer
again? Conor inspected the glasses on the table and tried to pick out his old one.
The other three were giving him that “cheerleader” look again, and he wished he’d
made his net shot into the wastebasket. Conor philosophically poured several inches
of vodka into the nearest glass. He scooped a handful of cubes from the bucket and
plopped them in. “Give me an S,” he said, raising the glass in a final toast. He drank.
“Give an I. Give me an N. Give me a … G. Give me an A.”

Beevers told him to sit down and be quiet, which was fine with Conor. He couldn’t
remember what came after A anyhow. Some
of the vodka slopped onto his pants as he sat down again beside Mike.

“Now can we go see Jimmy Stewart?” he heard Pumo ask.

A little while later someone suggested that he lie down and take a nap on Mike’s bed,
but Conor refused, no, no, he was fine, he was with his asshole buddies, all he had
to do was get moving, anybody who could still spell Singapore wasn’t too bent out
of shape …

Without any transition he found himself out in the corridor. He was having trouble
with his feet, and Mikey had a firm grip on his left arm. “What’s my room number?”
he asked Mikey.

“You’re staying with Tina.”

“Good old Tina.”

They turned a corner and good old Tina and Harry Beevers were right in front of them,
waiting for the elevator. Beevers was combing his hair in front of a big mirror.

The next thing Conor knew, he was sitting on the floor of the elevator, but he managed
to get back on his feet before the doors opened.

“You’re cute, Harry,” he said to the back of Beevers’ head.

The elevator door opened and for a long time they moved through long, blank hallways
crowded with people. Conor kept bumping into guys who were too impatient to listen
to his apologies. He heard people singing “Homeward Bound,” which was the world’s
most beautiful song. “Homeward Bound” made him feel like crying.

Poole was making sure he didn’t fall down. Conor wondered if Mike actually knew what
a great guy he was, and decided he didn’t—that was what made him so great.

“I’m really okay,” he said.

He sat down beside Mike in a darkened hall. A black-haired man with a narrow moustache,
wearing what looked like a prizefighter’s championship belt under his tuxedo, was
singing “America the Beautiful” and jumping around onstage in front of a band.

“We missed Jimmy Stewart,” Mike whispered to him. “This is Wayne Newton.”

“Wayne Newton?”
Conor asked, then heard that his voice
was too loud. People were laughing at what he had said. Conor felt too embarrassed
for Mikey to set him straight—Wayne Newton was a fat teenager who sang like a girl.
This Las Vegas toughie wasn’t Wayne Newton. Conor closed his eyes and the whole dark
hall instantly began to swing him around with it in great zooming circles. Conor found
that he was unable to open his eyes. Applause, whistles, shouts of approval filled
his ears. He heard his own first snore, and less than a second later fell into unconsciousness.

“We don’t have as many groupies as musicians,” Harry Beevers said to Poole, “but they’re
out there. They’re basically earth mothers with a kinky little yen for excitement.
Is he getting heavy? Put him on your couch and come back down to the bar with us.”

“I want to get to bed,” Poole said. Conor Linklater, a hundred and sixty pounds of
dead weight bequeathed to him by Tina Pumo, was draped over his shoulder.

Beevers breathed alcohol at Poole. “Nam groupies are complicated, but by now I’ve
got them figured out. They get off on, one, the idea of our being soldiers and fighting
men but more spiritual somehow than other vets—two, they’ve got a little slug of social
worker in them and they want to demonstrate that our country loves us after all—and
three, they don’t know what we did over there and it turns them on.” Beevers glittered
at him. “This has got to be the place. They’d come thousands of miles in their sleep
just to hang out at the bar.”

Poole had the uneasy feeling that, without knowing it, Harry Beevers was describing
Pat Caldwell, his ex-wife.

After Michael had rolled Conor onto the side of the bed the maid had not turned down,
he pulled off his friend’s black running shoes and undid his belt. Conor moaned; his
pale, veined eyelids fluttered. With his cropped red hair and pale skin, Conor Linklater
seemed to be about nineteen years old: without his scraggly beard and moustache, he
looked very like his Vietnam self. Poole covered Linklater with a spare blanket from
the closet; then he switched on the lamp on the other side of the bed and turned off
the overhead light. If Conor was to have slept on a couch in Pumo’s room, Pumo must
have taken a suite—Poole’s own room
did not offer a couch for the comfort of sodden visitors. Undoubtedly Beevers had
also taken a suite. (Harry had never considered turning over his own couch to Conor.)

It was a few minutes to twelve. Poole turned on the television and turned down the
volume, then sat in the closest chair and removed his own shoes. He draped his jacket
over the back of the other chair. Charles Bronson was standing on the grassy verge
of a road in a dainty, empty landscape that looked like western Ireland, looking through
binoculars at a grey Mercedes-Benz pulled up in the gravel forecourt of a Georgian
mansion. For a moment anticipatory silence surrounded the Mercedes, and then a bulging
wall of flame obliterated the car.

Michael picked up the telephone and set it on the table beside him. The maid had lined
up the bottles, stacked clear plastic glasses, removed the empties, and wrapped the
plate of cheese in cellophane. In the bucket, one bottle of beer stood neck-deep in
water, surrounded by floating slivers of ice. Michael dipped the topmost glass into
the bucket and scooped up ice and water. He took a sip.

Conor muttered “googol” and rolled his face into his pillow.

On impulse Michael picked up the phone and dialed his wife’s private line at home.
It was possible that Judy was lying awake in bed, reading something like
The One-Minute Manager
while successfully ignoring the television program she had turned on to keep her
company.

Judy’s telephone rang once, then clicked as if someone had picked it up. Poole heard
the mechanical hiss of tape, and knew that his wife had turned on her answering machine
with its third-person message:

“Judy is unable to answer the telephone at this time, but if you leave your name,
number, and message after the beep, she will get back to you as soon as possible.”

He waited for the beep.

“Judy, this is Michael. Are you home?” Judy’s machine was attached to the telephone
in her study, adjacent to the bedroom. If she were awake in her bed, she would hear
his voice. Judy did not respond; the tape whirred. Into the waiting machine he uttered
a few mechanical sentences, ending by saying, “I’ll be home late Sunday night. Bye-bye.”

In bed, Michael read a few pages of the Stephen King novel he had packed. Conor Linklater
complained and snuffled on the other side of the bed. Nothing in the novel seemed
more than slightly odder or more threatening than events in ordinary life.
Improbability and violence overflowed from ordinary life, and Stephen King seemed
to know that.

Before Michael could turn off his light, he was dripping with sweat, carrying his
copy of
The Dead Zone
through an army base many times larger than Camp Crandall. All around the camp, twenty
or thirty kilometers beyond the barbed-wire perimeter, stood hills once thickly covered
by trees, now so perfectly bombed and burned and defoliated that only charred sticks
protruded upwards from powdery brown earth. He walked past a row of empty tents and
at last heard the silence of the camp—he was alone. The camp had been abandoned, and
he had been left behind. A flagless flagpole stood before the company headquarters.
He trudged past the deserted building into a stretch of empty land and smelled burning
shit. Then he knew that this was no dream, he really was in Vietnam—the
rest
of his life was the dream. Poole never smelled things in his dreams. He didn’t think
he even dreamed in color most of the time. Poole turned around and saw an old Vietnamese
woman looking at him expressionlessly from beside an oil drum filled with burning
kerosene-soaked excrement. Dense black smoke boiled up from the drum and smudged the
sky. His despair was flat and unsurprising.

Wait a second, he thought, if this is reality it’s no later than 1969. He opened
The Dead Zone
to the page of publishing information. Deep in his chest, his heart deflated like
a punctured balloon. The copyright date was 1965. He had never left Vietnam. Everything
since had been only a nineteen-year-old’s wishful dream.