Koko (24 page)

“There were a couple of explosions, and a lot of yelling in Vietnamese from all around
us—I think they had let us just blunder along without being really certain of where
we were. Beevers’ radio silence at least did that much. The ones behind us started
shooting, and probably the only thing that saved our lives was that they weren’t sure
where we were, exactly, so they put their fire where they thought we were, the same
field where they’d wiped out nearly a whole company a week before. And their fire
exploded maybe eighty percent of the mines they had buried with the American bodies.”

It looked as if underground fireworks were destroying the field. There came a staggered,
arhythmic series of double explosions, the booming thud of the shell answered immediately
by the flat, sharp crack of the mine. Yellow-red flashes engulfed orange-red flashes,
then both flashes drowned in a boil of smoke and a gout of earth, throwing up a ribcage
lashed against a web belt, an entire leg still wearing a trouser leg and a boot.

“Why did they booby-trap the dead bodies?” Maggie whispered.

“Because they knew that someone would come back for them. You always come back for
your dead. It’s one of the only decent things about war. You bring your dead
back
with you.”

“Like going after Tim Underhill?”

“No, not at all. Well, maybe. I suppose.” He extended his arm. Maggie rested her head
on it and snuggled closer to him.

“Two guys got blown to pieces as soon as we started moving into the field. Beevers
ordered us forward, and he was right,
because they were readjusting their fire to blast the shit out of us where we were.
The first guy to go was a kid named Cal Hill who had just joined up with us, and the
other was a guy named Tattoo Tiano. I never knew his real name, but he was a good
soldier. So Tattoo got killed right away. Right next to me. There was this blast that
almost tore my head off when Tattoo set off the mine, and honest to God the air turned
bright red for a second. He really was right next to me. I thought
I
was dead. I couldn’t see or hear anything. There was nothing but this red mist all
around me. Then I heard the other one go off, and I could hear it when Hill started
screaming. ‘Move your tail, Pumo,’ Dengler yelled. ‘You still got it, move it.’ Norm
Peters, our medic, somehow got over to Hill and tried to do something for him. I finally
noticed that I was all wet,
covered
with Tattoo’s blood. We started getting a little light fire from up ahead, so we
got our weapons off our backs and returned fire. Artillery rounds started landing
back in the fringe of jungle we had just left. I could see Poole yelling into his
radio. The fire got a little heavier. We scattered out through the field and hunkered
down behind whatever we could find. Along with a few other people I flattened out
behind the fallen tree. I could see Peters wrapping up Cal Hill, trying to stop his
blood loss, and it looked inside out to me—it looked like Peters was torturing Hill,
squeezing the blood out of him. Hill was screaming his head off. We were demons, they
were demons, everybody was demons, there were no people left in the world anymore,
only demons. Hill sort of didn’t have any
middle
—where his stomach and guts and his cock should have been there was only this flat
red puddle. Hill could see what had happened to him, and he couldn’t
believe
it. He wasn’t in Nam long enough to believe it! ‘Stop that man screaming!’ Beevers
yelled. Some more light fire came at us from ahead, and then we heard someone shouting
at us from up there. ‘Rock ’n roar,’ this guy was shouting, ‘Rock ’n roar!’ ‘Elvis,’
Dengler said, and a whole bunch of guys started yelling at
him
, and squeezed off a couple of shots. Because this was the sniper who had appointed
himself our official assassin. He was one amazing shot, let me tell you. I raised
up and got off a shot, but I knew it wasn’t any good. M-16s used these little 5.56
millimeter bullets instead of 7.62 rounds, and so the cartridge clips were easier
to carry, eleven ounces instead of more than twice that, but the rounds spun in the
air, so they wobbled like crazy once they went a certain distance. In some ways, the
old M-14 was better—not only did it have better distance, you could actually
aim
an M-14. So I squeezed off some rounds, but I was pretty sure that even if I
could see old Elvis, I wouldn’t be able to hit him. But at least I’d have the satisfaction
of knowing what he looked like. Anyhow, so there we were, stuck in a minefield between
a lot of NVA, maybe a couple of companies working their way south to link up with
whatever they had in the A Shau Valley. Not to mention Elvis. And Poole couldn’t tell
anybody where we were, because not only had the lieutenant gotten us lost, his radio
had been hit and the fucker was no good anymore. So we were locked in. We spent the
next fifteen hours in a field full of dead men—with a lieutenant who was losing his
mind.”

“Oh God oh God,” Pumo heard the lieutenant repeating over and over. Calvin Hill noisily
continued to die, screaming as if Peters were poking hot needles through his tongue.
Other men were screaming too. Pumo could not see who they were, and he did not want
to know who they were. Part of Pumo wanted to stand up and get killed and get it over
with, and part of him was as scared of this feeling as of anything else that had happened.
He made the interesting discovery that there are layers of terror, each one colder
and more paralyzing than the one before it. Mortar rounds landed in the field at regular
intervals, and machine-gun fire now and then sprayed in from the sides. Pumo and everyone
else huddled in whatever troughs, shellholes, or bunkers they half-found, half dug
for themselves. Pumo had finally seen the lieutenant’s ruined helmet: it rested against
the kneecap of a dead soldier who had been lifted out of the ground by an exploding
mine. His kneecap, attached to his calf but to nothing else and white beneath its
coating of grime, lay on the ground only inches from the soldier’s head and shoulders,
likewise attached to nothing else. The dead soldier was looking at Pumo. His face
was very dirty. His eyes were open, and he looked stupid and hungry. Every time the
ground rumbled and the sky split apart with a new explosion, the head tilted a little
more toward Pumo and the shoulders swam across the ground toward him.

Pumo flattened himself against the ground. The coldest, deepest layer of terror told
him that when the dead soldier finally swam up and touched him, he’d die. Then he
saw Tim Underhill crawling toward the lieutenant and wondered why he bothered. The
sky was full of tracers and explosion. Night had come on in an instant. The lieutenant
was going to die. Underhill was going to die. Everybody was going to die. That was
the great secret. He seemed to hear M.O. Dengler saying
something to Poole and laughing. Laughing? Pumo was intensely aware, as the world
darkened and swooned around the impossibility ofthat laugh, of the odor of Tattoo
Tiano’s blood. ‘Did the lieutenant shit in his nice new pants?’ Underhill said. ‘Mike,
get your radio to work, will you?’ Dengler asked in a very reasonable voice.

A huge explosion rocked Pumo as it tore apart the sky. The air turned white, red,
deep black. Womanish-sounding screams came from a soldier Pumo could immediately identify
as Tony Ortega, Spacemaker Ortega, a good but brutal soldier who in civilian life
had been the leader of a motocycle gang called the Devilfuckers in upstate New York.
Ortega had been Victor Spitalny’s only friend in the platoon, and now Spitalny would
have no friends. Pumo realized that this didn’t matter, Spitalny would get killed
with the rest of them. Spacemaker Ortega’s screams gradually sank into the dark, as
if he were being carried away. “What are we going to do, what are we going to do,
oh God oh God,” Beevers wailed. “Oh God oh God oh God, I don’t want to die, I don’t
I don’t I can’t die
.”

Peters crawled away from the dead Ortega. In a sudden loud burst of light Pumo saw
him moving toward a twitching man ten or twelve yards off. Another land mine inaudibly
went off, for the ground shook and the dead man swam a few inches nearer Pumo.

A soldier named Teddy Wallace announced that he was going to waste that fucker Elvis,
and a friend of his named Tom Blevins said he’d follow. Pumo saw the two soldiers
rise into crouches and take off across the field. Before he had gone eight steps,
Wallace stepped on a pressure mine and was torn apart from crotch to chest. Wallace’s
left leg blew sideways and seemed to run above the field for a short time before it
fell. Tom Blevins got a few steps further before he pitched over as neatly as if he
had tripped over piano wire. “Rock ‘n roar!” Elvis shouted from up in the trees.

Suddenly Pumo became aware that Dengler was beside him. Dengler was grinning. “Don’t
you think God does all things simultaneously?” Dengler asked him.

“What?” he asked. Life doesn’t make sense, he thought, the world doesn’t make sense,
war doesn’t make sense, everything is only a terrible joke. Death was the great secret
at the bottom of the joke, and demons watched the world and capered and laughed.

“What I like about that idea is that in a funny way it
means that the universe actually created itself, which means that it goes on creating
itself, get me? So destruction is part of this creation that goes on all the time.
And on top of that is the real kicker, Pumo—destruction is the part of creation that
we think is beautiful.”

“Get fucked,” Pumo said. Now he understood what Dengler was doing: talking nonsense
to wake him up and make him capable of acting. Dengler didn’t understand that the
demons had made the world, and that death was their big secret.

Pumo became aware that he had not spoken in a long time. His eyes were filled with
tears. “Are you awake, Maggie?” he whispered.

Maggie breathed on easily and quietly, her perfect round head still resting on his
shoulder.

“That bastard stole my address book,” Pumo whispered. “Why the hell would she want
my address book? So she can steal clock radios and portable televisions from everyone
I know?”

In a carrying voice, Underhill said, “The demons are abroad and Dengler is trying
to convince Pumo that death is the mother of beauty—
”

“No, I’m not,” Dengler whispered, “you got it wrong, that’s not it, beauty has no
mother.
”

“Jesus,” Pumo said, and wondered how Underhill knew about the demons, he must have
seen them too.

Another great light exploded in the sky, and he could see the surviving members of
the platoon lying as if frozen in a snapshot, their faces turned to Underhill, who
seemed as calm, peaceful, and massive as a mountain. There was another secret here,
a secret as deep as the one the demons had, but what was it? Their own dead, and the
booby-trapped dead of the other company, lay sprawled all over the field. No, the
demons are deeper, Pumo thought, because this isn’t just hell, this is worse than
hell—in hell you’re dead and in this hell we still have to wait for other people to
kill us.

Norm Peters scurried back and forth, plugging sucking chest wounds. Then darkness
enclosed them again. When another giant light illuminated the sky a few seconds later,
Pumo saw that Dengler had left him and was following Peters around, helping him. Dengler
was smiling. He saw Pumo staring at him, and grinned and pointed upwards. Shine on,
he
meant, shine on, remember everything, the universe is making itself up right now.

Late at night the NVA began dropping in 60-mm shells from the M-2 mortars that had
been taken from the American company. Several times in the hour before morning Pumo
knew that he had gone stone crazy. The demons had come back, and roamed laughing through
the field. Pumo finally understood that they were laughing at him and Dengler, for
even if they lived through this night they would not be saved from dying senseless
deaths, and if all things were simultaneous their deaths were present now, and memory
was a twisted joke. He saw Victor Spitalny sawing the ears off Spacemaker Ortega,
the former ruler of the Devilfuckers, and that made the demons dance and cackle too.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he hissed, and picked up a clod of earth and threw
it at him. “That was your best friend
!”

“I gotta have somethin’ to show for this,” Spitalny said, but he gave up anyhow, shoved
his knife back in his belt and scuttled away like a jackal surprised at his feast
of carrion.

When the helicopters finally came in the NVA company had disappeared back into the
jungle, and the Cobras, the gun-ships, merely slammed a half-dozen rockets into the
canopy and fried a few monkeys before wheeling grandly in the air and returning to
Camp Crandall. The other helicopter descended over the clearing.

You never remembered how almost tranquil a UH1-B was until you were in one again.

“To tell you the truth, we’re New York City policemen,” Beevers said to the taxi driver,
a gaunt, toothless Chinese in a T-shirt who had just asked why they wanted to go to
Boogey Street.

“Ah,” the driver said. “Policemen.”

“We’re here on a case.”

“On a case,” said the driver. “Very good. This for television?”

“We’re looking for an American who liked Boogey Street,” Poole hastily explained.
Beevers’ face had turned red and his mouth was a thin line. “We know he moved to Singapore.
So we’d like to show his picture around on Boogey Street to see if anybody knows him.”

“Boogey Street no good for you,” the driver said.

“I’m getting out of this cab,” Beevers said. “I can’t stand it anymore. Stop. Pull
over. We’re getting out.”

The driver shrugged and obediently switched on his turn signal to begin making his
way across three lanes to the curbside.