Koko (5 page)

They had called while he was still downstairs in the lobby.

Michael Poole paced back and forth between the window overlooking the parking lot
and the door. Whenever he got to the door, he stopped and listened. The elevators
whirred in their chutes, carts squeaked past. After a little while he heard the
ping!
of the elevator, and he cracked the door open to look down the corridor. A trim grey-haired
man in a white shirt and a blue suit with a name tag on the lapel was hurrying toward
him a few paces ahead of a tall blonde woman wearing a grey flannel suit and a paisley
foulard tied in a fussy bow. Poole pulled back his head and closed the door. He heard
the man fumbling with his key a little way
down the hall. Poole wandered back to the window and looked down at the parking lot.
Half a dozen men dressed in unmatched parts of uniforms and holding beer cans had
settled on the hoods and trunks of various automobiles. They looked like they were
singing. Poole walked back to the door and waited. As soon as he heard the elevator
land once again on his floor, he opened the door and leaned out into the hall.

Tall, agitated Harry Beevers and Conor Linklater turned into the hallway together,
a harried-looking Tina Pumo a second later. Conor saw him first—he raised his fist
and grinned and called out “Mikey baby!” Unlike the last time Michael Poole had seen
him, Conor Linklater was smooth-shaven and his pale reddish hair had been cut almost
punkishly short. Conor normally wore baggy blue jeans and plaid shirts, but he had
taken unaccustomed pains with his wardrobe. Somewhere he had obtained a black T-shirt
with the stenciled legend
AGENT ORANGE
in big irregular yellow letters, and over this garment he wore a large, loose, many-pocketed
black denim vest with conspicuous white stitching. There were sharp creases in his
black trousers.

“Conor, you’re a vision of delight,” Poole said, stepping out into the corridor while
holding the door open with his outstretched left hand. Half a foot shorter than Michael,
Conor Linklater stepped up to him and wrapped his arms around his chest and hugged
him tightly.

“Man,” he said into Michael’s jawline, and playfully kissed him, “what a sight for
poor eyes.”

Smirking at this ripe Linklaterism, Harry Beevers sidled up beside Poole and, in a
wave of musky cologne, embraced him too, awkwardly. The corner of a briefcase struck
Poole’s hip. “Michael, a sight for ‘poor eyes,’ ” Beevers whispered into Poole’s ear.
Poole gently pulled himself away and got a vivid close-up of Harry Beevers’ large,
overlapping discolored teeth.

Tina Pumo bobbed back and forth before them in the corridor, grinning fiercely beneath
his heavy moustache. “You were asleep?” Pumo asked. “You didn’t get our message?”

“Okay, shoot me,” Poole said, smiling at Pumo. Conor and Beevers broke away from him
and moved separately toward the door. Pumo ducked his head like Tom Sawyer, all but
digging his toes into the carpet, said, “Aw, Mikey, I want to hug you too,” and did
it. “Good to see you again, man.”

“You too,” Michael said.

“Let’s get inside before we get arrested for having an orgy,”
Harry Beevers said, already standing in the entry to Michael’s room.

“Don’t get weird,
Lieutenant
,” Conor Linklater said, but moved toward the doorway anyhow, glancing sideways at
the other two. Pumo laughed and pounded Michael on the back, then let him go.

“So what have you guys been doing since you got here?” Michael asked. “Apart from
swearing at me, that is.”

Wandering around the room, Conor said, “Teeny-Tiny’s been sweatin’ out his restaurant.”
Teeny-Tiny was a reference to the origins of Pumo’s nickname, which had begun as Tiny
when he was an undersized child in an undersized town in upstate New York, was modulated
later to Teeny, and had finally altered to Tina. After a decade of working in restaurants,
Pumo now owned one in SoHo that served Vietnamese food and had been lavishly praised
some months before in
New York
magazine. “He made two calls already, man. Him and the Health Department are gonna
keep me awake all night.”

“It’s not really anything,” Tina protested. “I picked an awkward time to go away,
that’s all. We have to do certain things in the restaurant, and I want to make sure
they’re done right.”

“Health Department?” Michael asked.

“Really, it’s nothing serious.” Pumo grinned fiercely. His moustache bristled, the
joyless creases at the corners of his eyes deepened and lengthened. “We’re doing great.
Booked solid most nights.” He sat on the edge of the bed. “Harry can vouch for me.
We do great business.”

“What can I say?” Beevers asked. “You’re a success story.”

“You looked around the hotel?” Poole asked.

“We checked out the meeting areas downstairs, had a look around,” Pumo said. “It’s
a big party. We can do some stuff tonight, if you want.”

“Some party,” Beevers said. “A lot of guys standing around with their thumbs in their
asses.” He shrugged his jacket over the back of his chair, revealing suspenders on
which cherubs romped against a red background. “No organization,
nada, rien.
The only people with their shit together are the First Air Cav. They have a booth,
they help you locate other guys from your unit. We looked around, but I don’t think
we saw anybody from our whole damn division. Besides that, they put us into a grubby
dump of
a hall that looks like a high school gym. There’s a Diet Coke stand, if that turns
you on.”

“High school gym, man,” Conor muttered. He was staring intently at the bedside lamp.
Poole smiled at Tina Pumo, who smiled back. Linklater picked up the lamp and examined
the inside of the shade, then set it down and ran his fingers along the cord until
he found the switch. He turned the lamp on, then off.

“Sit down, for God’s sake, Conor,” Beevers said. “You make me nervous, messing with
everything like that. We’ve got serious business to talk about, if you don’t remember.”

“I remember, I remember,” Conor protested, turning away from the lamp. “Hey, there’s
no place to sit in here on account of you and Mike got the chairs and Tina’s already
on the bed.”

Harry Beevers stood up, yanked his jacket off the back of his chair, and made a sweeping
gesture toward the empty seat. “If it’ll get you to settle down, I’ll gladly surrender
my chair. Take it, Conor—I’m giving it to you. Sit down.” He picked up his glass and
sat down next to Pumo on Michael’s bed. “You think you can sleep in the same room
with this guy? He probably still talks to himself all night.”

“Everybody in my family talks to themselves,
Lieutenant
,” said Conor. He hitched his chair closer to the table. Conor began thumping his
fingers on the table, as if playing an imaginary piano. “I guess they don’t act like
that at Harvard—”

“I didn’t go to Harvard,” Beevers wearily said.

“Mikey!” Conor beamed at Poole as if seeing him for the first time. “It’s
great
to see you!” He slapped Poole on the back.

“Yeah,” Tina Pumo said. “How are things going, Michael? It’s been a while.”

These days Tina was living with a beautiful Chinese girl in her early twenties named
Maggie Lah, whose brother was a bartender at Saigon, Tina’s restaurant. Before Maggie
there had been a series of girls, each of whom Tina had claimed to love.

“Well, I’m thinking of making some changes,” Michael said. “I’m busy all day long,
but at night I can hardly remember what I did.”

A loud knocking came from the door, and Michael said “Room service,” and stood up.
The waiter wheeled in the cart and arranged the glasses and bottles on the table.
The atmosphere in the room became more festive as Conor opened a Budweiser and Harry
Beevers poured vodka into an empty glass. Michael never explained his half-formed
plan of selling his practice in Westerholm
and seeing what he might be able to do in some gritty place like the South Bronx where
children really needed doctors. Judy usually walked out of the room whenever he began
to talk about it.

After the waiter left, Conor stretched out on the bed, rolled on his side, and said,
“So you saw Dengler’s name? It was right there?”

“Sure. I got a little surprise, though. Do you know what his full name was?”

“M.O. Dengler,” Conor said.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Beevers said. “It was Mark, I think.” He looked to Tina for help,
but Tina frowned and shrugged.

“Manuel Orosco Dengler,” Michael said. “I was amazed that I didn’t know that.”

“
Manuel
?” Conor said. “Dengler was
Mexican?”

“Michael, you got the wrong Dengler,” Tina Pumo said, laughing.

“Nope,” Michael said. “There’s not only one
M.O.
Dengler, there’s only one Dengler. He’s ours.”

“A Mexican,” Conor mused.

“You ever hear of any Mexicans named Dengler? His parents just gave him Spanish names,
I guess. Who knows? Who even cares? He was a hell of a soldier, that’s all I know.
I wish—”

Pumo raised his glass to his mouth instead of finishing his sentence, and none of
the men spoke for an almost elastically long moment.

Linklater muttered something unintelligible and walked across the room and sat on
the floor.

Michael stood up to add fresh ice cubes to his glass and saw Conor Linklater backed
up against the far wall like an imp in his black clothes, the brown beer bottle dangling
between his knees. The orange writing on his chest was nearly the same shade as his
hair. Conor was looking back at him with a small secret smile.

Maybe Beans Beevers didn’t go to Harvard or Yale, Conor was thinking, but he had gone
someplace like that—someplace where everybody in sight just took it all for granted.
To Conor it seemed that about ninety-five percent of the people in the United States
did nothing but fret and stew about money—not having enough
money made them crazy. They zeroed out on booze, they cranked themselves up to commit
robberies: oblivion, tension, oblivion. The other five percent of the population rode
above this turmoil like froth on a wave. They went to the schools their fathers had
gone to and they married and divorced one another, as Harry had married and divorced
Pat Caldwell. They had jobs where you shuffled papers and talked on the telephone.
From behind their desks they watched the money stroll in the door, coming home. They
even passed out these jobs to each other—Beans Beevers, who spent as much time at
the bar in Pumo’s restaurant as he did at his desk, worked in the law firm run by
Pat Caldwell’s brother.

When Conor had been a boy in South Norwalk, a kind of wondering and resentful curiosity
had made him pedal his old Schwinn up along Route 136 to Mount Avenue in Hampstead.
Mount Avenue people were so rich they were nearly invisible, like their enormous houses—from
the road all you could see of some of them were occasional sections of brick or stucco
walls. Most of these waterfront mansions seemed empty of anybody but servants, yet
now and then young Conor would spot an obvious owner-resident. Conor learned from
his brief sightings that although these Mount Avenue owner-residents usually wore
the same grey suits and blue jackets as everyone else in Hampstead, sometimes they
blazoned forth like Harry Beevers in riotous pink and bilious green, in funny-looking
bow ties and pale double-breasted suits. It was sort of like the Emperor’s New Clothes—nobody
had the balls to tell Protestant millionaires they looked ridiculous. (Conor was certain
that none of these people could be Catholic.) Bow ties! Red suspenders with pictures
of babies on them!

Conor couldn’t help smiling to himself—here he was, almost flat broke, thinking he
ought to pity a rich lawyer. Next week he had a job taping sheetrock in a remodeled
kitchen, for which he might earn a couple hundred dollars. Harry Beevers could probably
earn double that sitting on a barstool, talking to Jimmy Lah. Conor looked up, his
sense of humor painfully sparkling, and saw Michael Poole looking at him as if the
same kind of thought had occurred to him.

Beevers had some typical bullshit up his sleeve, Conor thought, but Michael knew better
than to fall for it, whatever it was.

Conor smiled to himself, remembering Dengler’s word for people who never experienced
dread and took everything for granted: “toons,” as in cartoons. Now the toons were
running
everything—they were scrambling upward, running over everything in their way. These
days it seemed that half the people in Donovan’s, Conor’s favorite South Norwalk bar,
had MBAs, put mousse on their hair, and drank blender drinks. Conor had the sense
that some enormous change had happened all at once, that all these new people had
just popped out of their own television sets. He could almost feel sorry for them,
their morality was so fucked up.

Thinking about the toons depressed Conor. He felt like drinking a lot more even though
he knew he was getting close to his limit. But wasn’t this a reunion? They were sitting
around in a hotel room like a bunch of old men. He drained the last of his beer.

“Give me some of that vodka, Mikey,” he said, and lobbed the empty beer bottle into
the wastebasket.

“Attaboy,” Pumo said, raising his glass to him.

Michael made a drink and came across the room to hand it to Conor.

“Okay, a toast,” Conor said, and stood up. “
Man.
It feels
good
to do this.” He raised his glass. “To M.O. Dengler. Even if he was a Mexican, which
I doubt.”

Conor poured ice-cold vodka into his mouth and gulped it down. He felt better instantly,
so good that he downed the rest. “Man, sometimes I can remember shit that happened
over there like it was yesterday, and the stuff that really did happen yesterday,
I can’t hardly remember at all. I mean—sometimes I’ll start to think about that guy
who ran that club at Camp Crandall, who had that gigantic wall of beer cases—”

“Manly,” Tina Pumo said, laughing.