Koko (4 page)

Dengler had even liked the C-rations scorned by the others. He claimed the dogfood
taste of army turkey loaf, canned in 1945, was better than anything his mother had
ever made. Dengler had liked being on patrol.
(Hey, I was on patrol the whole time I was a kid.)
Heat, cold, and dampness had affected him very little. According to Dengler, rainbows
froze to the ground during Milwaukee ice storms and kids ran out of their houses,
chipped off pieces of their favorite colors, and licked them until they were white.
As for violence and the fear of death, Dengler said that you saw at least as much
violence outside the normal Milwaukee tavern as in the average firefight; inside,
he claimed, you saw a bit more.

In Dragon Valley, Dengler had fearlessly moved about under
fire, dragging the wounded Trotman to Peters, the medic, keeping up a steady, calm,
humorous stream of talk. Dengler had known that nothing there would kill him.

Poole stepped forward, careful not to trample on a photograph or a wreath, and ran
his fingers over the sharp edges of Dengler’s name, carved into the chill stone.

He had a quick, unhappy, familiar vision of Spitalny and Dengler running together
through billowing smoke toward the mouth of the cave at Ia Thuc.

Poole turned away from the wall. His face felt too tight. The blonde woman gave him
a sympathetic, wary half-smile and pulled her little girl backwards out of his way.

Poole wanted to see
his
ex-warriors. Feelings of loneliness and isolation wrapped themselves tightly around
him.

Michael was so certain that a message from his friends would be waiting for him at
the hotel that once he got there he marched straight from the revolving door to the
desk. Harry Beevers had assured him that he and the others would arrive “sometime
in the afternoon.” It was now just before ten minutes to five.

Poole started to scan the wall behind the desk for his messages as soon as he could
read the room numbers beneath the pigeonholes. When he was three-fourths of the way
across the lobby, he saw one of the white hotel message forms inserted diagonally
into his own rectangular box. He immediately felt much less tired. Beevers and the
other two had arrived.

Michael stepped up to the desk and caught the clerk’s eye. “There’s a message for
me,” he said. “Poole, room 204.” He took the oversize key from his jacket pocket and
showed it to the clerk, who began to inspect the wall behind him with an almost maddening
lack of haste. At last the clerk found the correct slot and
withdrew the message. He glanced at the form as he handed it to Poole, then smiled.

“Sir.”

Michael took the form, looked first at the name, and turned his back on the clerk
to read the message.
Tried to call back. Did you really hang up on me? Judy.
The time 3:55 was stamped on the form in purple ink—she had called just after Michael
had left his room.

He turned around and found the clerk looking at him blankly. “I’d like to know if
some people who were supposed to be here by now have checked in yet.”

Poole spelled the names.

The clerk slowly pecked at buttons on a computer terminal, frowned, tilted his head,
frowned again, and without changing his posture in any way looked sideways at Michael
and said, “Mr. Beevers and Mr. Pumo have not arrived as yet. We have no booking for
a Mr. Linklater.”

Conor was probably saving money by sleeping in Pumo’s room.

Poole turned away, folded Judy’s message into his jacket pocket, and for the first
time since his return saw what had happened to the lobby.

Men in dark suits and striped neckties now occupied the banquettes and tables. Most
of them had no facial hair and wore white name tags crowded with print. They were
talking quietly, consulting legal pads, punching numbers into pocket computers. During
his first surreal eighteen months back from Vietnam, Michael Poole had been able to
tell if a man had been in Vietnam just by the way he held his body. His instinct for
distinguishing vets from civilians had faded since then, but he knew he could not
be mistaken about this group.

“Hello, sir,” said a clarion voice at his elbow.

Poole looked down at a beaming young woman with a fanatical face surrounded by a bubble
of blonde hair. She held a tray of glasses filled with black liquid.

“Might I inquire, sir, if you are a veteran of the Vietnam conflict?”

“I was in Vietnam,” Poole said.

“The Coca-Cola Company joins the rest of America in thanking you personally for your
efforts during the Vietnam conflict. We wish to take this opportunity to express our
gratitude to you,
and to introduce you to our newest product, Diet Coke, in the hope that you will enjoy
it and will share your pleasure with your friends and fellow veterans.”

Poole looked upward and saw that a long, brilliantly red banner of some material like
parachute silk had been suspended far above the lobby. White lettering said:
THE COCA-COLA CORPORATION AND DIET COKE SALUTE THE VETERANS OF VIETNAM!
He looked back down at the girl.

“I guess I’ll pass.”

The girl increased the wattage of her smile and looked amazingly like every one of
the stewardesses on Poole’s flight into Vietnam from San Francisco. Her eyes shifted
away from him, and she was gone.

The desk clerk said, “You’ll find your meeting areas downstairs, sir. Perhaps your
friends are waiting for you there.”

The executives in their blue suits sipped their drinks, pretending not to monitor
the girls walking around the lobby with their inhuman smiles and trays of Diet Coke.
Michael touched Judy’s note in his jacket pocket. Either it or the tips of his fingers
felt hot. If he sat down in the lobby bar to watch the arrivals coming through the
door, within minutes he would be asked if he were a veteran of the Vietnam conflict.

Poole went to the bank of elevators and waited while an odd mixture of veterans and
Coca-Cola executives, each group pretending the other group did not exist, left the
car. Only one other man, a drunken mountainous being in tiger-striped fatigues, entered
the elevator with him. The man studied the buttons and pushed
SIXTEEN
four or five times, then stumbled against the railing at the back of the car. He
emitted a foggy bourbon-flavored burp. Poole finally recognized him as the van driver
who had smashed into the Camaro.

“You know this, don’t you?” the giant asked him. He straightened up and began to bellow
out a song Poole and every other veteran knew by heart.
“Homeward bound, I wish I were homeward bound”…

Poole joined him on the second line, singing softly and tunelessly,
and then the car stopped and the door opened. The giant, who had closed his eyes,
continued to sing as Poole stepped from brown elevator carpet to green hall carpet.
The doors slid shut. The elevator ascended and Poole heard the man’s voice echoing
down the shaft.

A North Vietnamese soldier who looked like a twelve-year-old boy stood over Poole,
prodding his neck with the barrel of a contraband Swedish machine gun he must have
killed someone to get. Poole was pretending he was dead so that the NVA would not
shoot him; his eyes were closed, but he had a vivid picture of the soldier’s face.
Coarse black hair fell over a broad, unlined forehead. The black eyes and abrupt,
almost lipless mouth seemed nearly serene in their lack of expression. When the rifle
barrel pushed painfully into his neck, Poole let his head slide fractionally across
the greasy earth in what he hoped was a realistic imitation of death. He could not
die: he was a father and he had to live. Huge iridescent bugs whirred in the air above
his face, their wings clacking like shears.

The tip of the barrel stopped jabbing his neck. An outsized drop of sweat squeezed
itself out of Poole’s right eyebrow and trickled into the little depression between
the bridge of his nose and the corner of his eye; one of the rusty-sounding insects
blundered
into his lips. When the NVA did not move on to any of the real corpses near him, Poole
knew that he was going to die. His life was over, and he would never know his son,
whose name was Robert. Like his love for this unknown son, the knowledge that the
soldier was going to blow his head apart here on the narrow field full of dead men
was total.

The shot did not come. Another of the rusty insects fell onto his sweat-slick cheek
like a spent bullet and took a maddening length of time scrabbling to its legs before
it lumbered off.

Then Poole heard a faint click and rustle, as of some object being pulled from a casing.
The soldier’s feet moved as he shifted his weight. Poole realized that the man was
kneeling beside him. An entirely uncurious hand, the size of a girl’s, pushed his
head flat into the smeary earth, then yanked his right ear. His impersonation of a
dead man had been too successful—the NVA wanted his ear as a trophy. Poole’s eyes
snapped open by themselves, and before them, on the other side of a long grey knife
where the sky should have been, hung the motionless black eyes of the other soldier.
The North Vietnamese gasped. For a brimming half second the air filled with the stench
of fish sauce.

Poole jackknifed up off his bed and the NVA melted away. The telephone was ringing.
The first thing he was fully conscious of was that his son was gone again.

Gone too were the corpses and the lumbering insects. Poole groped for the phone. “Mike?”
came tinnily from the receiver. He looked over his shoulder and saw bland pale wallpaper,
a painting of a misty Chinese landscape over the bed. He found that he could breathe.

“This is Michael Poole,” he said into the receiver.

“Mikey! How are you? You sound a little weirded-out, man.” Poole finally recognized
the voice of Conor Linklater, who had turned his head away from the telephone and
was saying, “Hey, I got him! He’s in his room! I told you, man, Mike’s just gonna
be in his room, remember?” Then Conor was speaking to him again. “Hey, didn’t you
get our message, man?”

Conversations with Conor Linklater, Michael was reminded, tended to be more scattered
than conversations with most other people. “I guess not. What time did you get in?”
He looked at his watch and saw that he had been asleep for half an hour.

“We got here about
four-thirty
, man, and we called you right away, and at first they said you weren’t here and Tina
made ’em look twice and then they said you
were
here, but nobody answered your phone. Okay. How come you didn’t answer our message?”

“I went out to the Memorial,” Poole said. “I got back a little before five. I was
in the middle of a nightmare when you woke me up.”

Conor did not say good-bye and he did not hang up. Speaking more softly than before,
he said, “Man, you sound like that nightmare really weirded you out.”

A rough hand tugging his ear away from his head; the ground greasy with blood. Poole’s
memory gave him the picture of a field where exhausted men carried corpses toward
impatient helicopters in the hazy blue light of early morning. Some of the corpses
had blood-black holes where they should have had ears. “I guess I went back to Dragon
Valley,” Poole said, having just understood this.

“Be cool,” Conor Linklater said. “We’re already out the door.” He hung up.

Poole splashed water on his face in the bathroom, roughly used a towel, and examined
himself in the mirror. In spite of his nap he looked pale and tired. Megavitamins
encased in clear plastic lay on the counter beside his toothbrush, and he peeled one
free and swallowed it.

Before he went down the hall to the ice machine, he dialed the number for messages.

The man who answered told him that he had two messages. “The first one is stamped
3:55, and reads ‘Tried to call back—’ ”

“I picked that one up at the desk,” Poole said.

“The second is stamped 4:50, and reads ‘We just arrived. Where are you? Call 1315
when you return.’ It’s signed ‘Harry.’ ”