Koko (25 page)

“Why do you say Boogey Street is no good for us?” Poole asked.

“Nothing there anymore. Mister Lee, he clean it all up.”

“Cleaned it up?”

“Mister Lee make all the girl-boys leave Singapore. No more—only pictures.”

“What do you mean, only pictures?”

“You walk down Boogey Street at night,” the driver patiently explained, “you go past
many bars. Outside bars you see pictures. You buy pictures, take them home.”

“Goddamn,” Beevers said.

“Someone in one of those bars will know Underhill,” Poole said. “He might not have
left Singapore just because the transvestites did.”

“You don’t think so?” Beevers yelled. “Would you buy a jigsaw puzzle if the most important
piece was missing?”

“See points of interest in Singapore,” the driver said. “Tonight, Boogey Street. For
now, Tiger Balm Gardens.”

“I hate gardens,” Beevers said.

“Not flower garden,” the driver said. “Sculpture garden. Many style Chinese architecture.
Depictions of Chinese folklore. Thrilling scenes.”

“Thrilling scenes,” Beevers said.

“Python devouring Goat. Tiger ready for attack. Ascension of White Snake Spirit. Wild
Man of Borneo. So Ho Shang trapped in Spider’s Den. Spider Spirit in form of Beautiful
Woman.”

“Sounds good to me,” Conor said.

“Best part, many scenes of torture. Scenes in infernal regions depicting punishment
given souls after death. Very beautiful. Very instructive. Very scary.”

“What do you think?” Conor asked.

“It’s the punishment given souls before death that worries me,” Poole said. “But let’s
have a look.”

The driver instantly cut across three lanes of traffic.

He dropped them off at the bottom end of a wide walk leading up to a gate with the
words
HAW PAR VILLA
suspended between green and white columns. People streamed in both directions through
this gate. Above it was a hillside of purple-grey plaster that to Poole resembled
a section from a giant brain. A short distance away stood a taller, gaudier gate in
the shape of a tiered pagoda. Chinese people in short sleeves and summer dresses,
Chinese teenagers in wildly colored clothes, schoolgirls uniformed like boys at an
English public school, old couples holding hands, crew-cut boys skipping along in
short pants, all these people milled up and down the broad walkway. At least half
of them seemed to be eating something. The sun sparkled off the white paint of the
pagoda gate and threw deep black shadows across the slabs of the walk. Poole wiped
sweat off his forehead. The day grew hotter every hour, and his collar was already
damp.

They passed beneath the second gate. Just past a huge allegorical figure representing
Thailand was a tableau of a peasant woman sprawled on the representation of a field,
her basket lost behind her, her arms outstretched in a plea for help. A child raced
toward her, a peasant in shorts and a pagoda hat extended an arm to threaten or aid.
(The handout booklet explained that he is offering her a bottle of Tiger Balm.) Two
oxen locked horns in the background.

Sweat poured down Poole’s face. He remembered a muddy field slanting down a Vietnamese
hillside and Spitalny raising his rifle to sight on a woman scampering toward a circle
of hootches beyond which lean oxen grazed. Her bright blue pajamas shone vividly against
the brown field. Mosquitos. The heavy pails of water suspended on a wooden yoke over
the woman’s shoulders hampered her movements: Poole remembered the shock of recognizing
that the pails of water were as important to her as her life—she would not throw the
yoke off her shoulders. Spitalny’s rifle cracked, and the woman’s feet lifted, and
for a moment she sped along parallel to the ground without touching it. Soon she collapsed
in a blue puddle beside the long curved yoke. The pails clattered downhill. Spitalny
fired again. The oxen bolted away from the village, running so close together their
flanks touched. The woman’s body jerked forward as if it had been pushed by an invisible
force, and then began to roll loosely downhill. Her forearms flipped up, out, up like
spokes on a broken flywheel.

Poole turned to Harry Beevers, who had glanced at the statues on top of the brain-wall
and was now staring at two pretty Chinese girls giggling together near the pagoda
gate. “Do you remember Spitalny shooting that girl outside Ia Thuc? The one in blue
pajamas?”

Beevers glanced at him, blinked, then looked back at the sculptures of the farmer
and his wife. He nodded and smiled. “Sure. But that was in another country, and besides,
the wench is dead.”

“No,” Conor said, “that was another
wench
, and besides, the
country’s
dead.”

“She was obviously VC,” Beevers said. He glanced again at the Chinese girls as if
they too were Viet Cong who ought to be executed. “She was there, therefore she was
VC.”

The two girls were now walking past Beevers as if on tiptoe. They were slender girls
with shoulder-length black hair and dresses of the sort, Poole thought, that used
to be called frocks. Were there still frocks? He glanced up the hill and saw another
pack of schoolgirls in uniform—dark blazers and flat hats.

“This whole place is back in the fifties,” Beevers said. “I don’t mean the gardens,
I mean Singapore. It’s about 1954 over here. You get arrested for jaywalking, littering,
and spitting on the street. You ever go to one of those towns out West where they
reenact gunfights? Where the falls are all rehearsed and the guns have no bullets
and nobody gets hurt?”

“Aw, come
on
,” Conor said.

“I have a feeling that’s Boogey Street,” Beevers said.

“Let’s find the torture chamber,” Poole said, and Conor laughed out loud.

On the crown of the hill, with a view down across the terraces and ornaments of the
garden, stood a giant brain of gnarled, twisted blue plaster. A white sign announced
in red letters:
TORTURE CHAMBER HERE.
“Hey, this doesn’t look so bad,” Beevers said. “I ought to get pictures of this.”
He took his Instamatic out of his pocket and checked the number on the back. Then
he went up the low concrete steps and through the entrance. Winking at Poole, Conor
followed.

The cool, shady interior of the plaster grotto had been divided in half by a walkway
from which one looked down through wire fences at a sequence of busy scenes. When
Poole stepped inside, his friends were already well along, Beevers snapping shot after
shot with his camera up to his eye. Most of the Chinese in the Torture Chamber stared
at the tableaux beneath them without betraying any feeling at all. A few children
chattered and pointed.

“Great, great stuff,” Beevers said.

CHAMBER OF BOULDERS
, read a plaque before the first scene.
THE FIRST COURT.
From between the halves of a giant slablike
boulder protruded the heads, legs, trunks, arms of people eternally crushed to death.
Claw-footed demons in robes pulled screeching children toward the boulder.

In the
SECOND COURT
, horned devils pierced sinners with huge pronged forks and held them over flames.
Another demon ripped the stomach and intestines from an agonized man. Others hurled
children into a long pool of blood.

A blue demon sliced off the tongue of a man tied to a stake.

Poole wandered along the path between the exhibits, hearing Harry Beevers’ camera
clicking, clicking away.

Grinning devils cut women in half, sliced men into sections, boiled screaming sinners
in vats of oil, grilled them against red hot pillars.…

Conscious—nearly conscious—of another memory hidden beneath this one, Poole found
himself remembering the emergency ward where during his internship he had spent too
much time tying blood vessels and cleaning wounds, listening to screams and moans
and curses, attending to people with their faces cut to pieces by knives or windshields,
people who had nearly killed themselves with drugs …

 … sell me some of that fuckin’ morphine, Doc?
a young Puerto Rican in a blood-soaked T-shirt asked him while he frantically sutured
a long wound with baseball stitches, sweating as the addict’s blood pooled around
him …

 … blood everywhere, blood on the concrete slab, blood on the rocks, severed arms
and legs on the floor, naked men hung split open by the knives sprouting from an evil
tree …

“Clean out of my eyesight, man,” Poole heard Conor say. “Hey, Mikey, these guys really
believed in survival and fitness, huh?” Survival and fitness? He realized that Conor
meant survival of the fittest.

Why did Beevers want pictures of this stuff?

He heard the screaming of a long-dead soldier named Cal Hill and heard Dengler’s funny,
snide Midwestern voice saying
Don’t you think God does all things simultaneously?

Dengler was right, God did all things simultaneously.

Every day of those months, Poole had forced himself to go to work. He had forced himself
out of bed, into the drizzle of the shower, pulled himself into his clothes, grimly
started his car, struggled into his scrub suit in a depression almost too total to
be seen. He had gone for days without speaking to anyone. Judy had attributed his
gloom, silence, and buried rage to the stresses and miseries of the emergency room,
to the presence of people dying
literally under his hand, to the abuse pouring out of everyone around him.…

Sweating in the cool shade of the plaster cave, Poole moved a few paces along. A woman
wearing the white hide of a rabbit on her back and a man covered by a pig’s coarse
hide knelt before an imperious judge. Poole remembered the rabbit Ernie’s mild beautiful
fearful eyes. Other figures busied themselves around them. A monster aimed a spear,
a scribe wrote on an eternal scroll. Almost exactly a year later, during his pediatric
residency at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in New York, Poole had finally understood.

And here it was again, that place, in a plaster brain on top of a hill in Singapore.

Poole heard Beevers laughing to himself outside the grotto.

He wiped his forehead and walked outside into a blast of heat and a blinding dazzle
of sunlight. Harry Beevers stood before him, grinning with all his overlapping teeth.

A little way down the hill lay a huge pit filled with plaster replicas of giant blue-green
crabs. Big black toads stared fixedly out through the mesh. In another brain-grotto
on the other side of the path a giant woman with a chicken’s head and corpse-white
arms yanked at the arm of her husband, who had the wattled head of a duck. Poole saw
murder in the woman’s determination, the duck-man’s alarm. Marriage was murder.

Beevers snapped off another picture. “This is great,” he said, and turned around to
focus on the giant wrinkled brain they had just left.
TORTURE CHAMBER HERE.

“There are girls in New York,” Beevers said, “who will go crazy when they see these
pictures. You don’t think that’s right? There are girls in New York who’d go down
on Gabby Hayes if he showed them this stuff.”

Conor Linklater strolled away laughing.

“You think I don’t know what I’m talking about?” His voice
was too loud. “Ask Pumo—he hangs out where I hang out, he knows.”

After they left the Tiger Balm Gardens they walked for a long time without quite knowing
where they were or where they were going. “Maybe we should go back to the Gardens,”
Conor said. “This is nowhere.”

It was nearly a literal, though a peaceful, nowhere. They were walking uphill along
a smooth grey road between a high bank covered with perfectly mown grass and a long
slope dotted with bungalows set at wide intervals amongst the trees. Since leaving
the Gardens the only human being they had seen had been a uniformed chauffeur in sunglasses
driving an otherwise empty black Mercedes Benz 500 SEL.

“We must have walked over a mile already,” Beevers said. He had torn the map out of
Papineau’s Guide
, and was turning it over and over in his hands. “You can turn back by yourself if
you want to. There’ll be something at the top of this hill. Pretty soon Frankie Avalon
and Annette Funicello will drive by in a woodie. Goddamn, I can’t find where we are
on the fucking map.” He almost immediately stopped walking and stared at a certain
point on the misleading map. “That stupid shit Underhill.”

“Why?” Conor asked.

“Boogey Street isn’t Boogey Street. That dodo didn’t know what he was talking about.
It’s B-U-G-I-S Street. Boo-giss Street. That has to be it, there isn’t anything else
even close.”

“But I thought the cabdriver …?”

“It’s still Boo-giss Street, it says so right here.” He looked up with wild eyes.
“If Underhill didn’t know where he was going, how the hell does he expect us to find
him?”

They trudged further uphill and came to an intersection without roadsigns. Beevers
resolutely turned right and began marching off. Conor protested that the center of
town and their hotel were the other way, but Beevers continued walking until they
gave in and joined him.

Half an hour later an amazed-looking taxi driver stopped and picked them up.

“Marco Polo Hotel,” Beevers said. He was breathing heavily, and his face had become
so mottled Poole could not tell if it was
pink flecked with white, or white flecked with pink. A sweat stain shaped like a torpedo
darkened the back of his jacket from shoulder to shoulder and extended a damp fin
down to the small of his back. “I have to have a shower and a nap.”

“Why you going in opposite direction?” the driver asked.

Beevers refused to speak.

“Hey, we got a little bet going,” Conor said. “Is it Boo-giss Street or Boogey Street?”