Koko (74 page)

“Karl was a man of God,” Helga said. “You can see that plainly. He was chosen. My
Karl was not a lazy man. You can see that too. He was not
soft.
He never shirked his duty, not even when his duty was to stand on a street corner
in below zero weather. The News would not wait for fine weather, and it needed a hard,
dedicated man to tell it, and that was my Karl. So we needed help. Someday we would
be old.
But we didn’t know what was going to happen to us
!” She was panting, and her eyes bulged behind the round glasses. Again Poole felt
that her body was gathering density, pulling into it all the air in the room and along
with it all that ever was or ever would be right or moral, leaving them forever in
the wrong.

“Who were his parents?” Poole heard Underhill ask, and knew that she would misunderstand.

“Fine people. Who would have had such a son? Strong people. Karl’s father was also
a butcher, he taught him the trade, and Karl taught Manny the trade so that Manny
could work for us while we did the Lord’s own work. We raised him from the gutter
and gave him eternal life, so. He was to work for us and provide for our old age.”

“I see,” said Underhill, bending forward slightly to glance at Michael. “We’d also
like to know something about your son’s parents.”

Mrs. Dengler folded the photograph album shut and laid it across her lap. Some of
the musty smell had permeated the cardboard, and for a moment the odor eddied about
them.

“He didn’t have parents.” She gleamed at them, self-satisfaction personified. “Not
the way real people do, not like Karl and me. Manny was born out of wedlock. His mother,
Rosita, sold her body. One of
those
women. She delivered the baby in Mount Sinai Hospital and abandoned him there, just
walked out as fancy as you please, and the baby had a viral infection—he nearly died.
Many did, but did he? My husband and I prayed for him, and he did
not
die. Rosita Orosco died a few weeks later.
Beaten
to death. Do you think the boy’s father killed her? Manny was Spanish only on his
mother’s side, that’s what Karl and I always thought. So you see what I mean. He had
neither mother nor father.”

“Was Manny’s father one of his mother’s customers?” Underhill asked.

“We did not think about it.”

“But you said that you did not think the father was Spanish … Latin American.”

“Well.” Helga Dengler shifted on the stool, and her eyes changed weather. “He had
a good side to balance the bad.”

“How did you come to adopt him?”

“Karl heard about the poor baby.”

“How did he hear? Had you gone to adoption agencies?”

“Of course not. I think the woman came to him. Rosita Orosco. My husband’s church
work brought many low, unhappy people to us, begging for their souls to be saved.”

“Did you see Rosita Orosco at the church services?”

Now she planted both feet on the floor and stared at him. She seemed to be breathing
through her skin. Nobody spoke for an excruciating time.

“I didn’t mean to offend you, Mrs. Dengler,” Underhill finally said.

“We had white people at our services,” she said in a low, slow, even voice. “Sometimes
we had Catholics. But they were always good people. Polishers. They can be as good
as anyone else.”

“I see,” Underhill said. “You never saw Manny’s mother at your services.”

“Manny did not have a mother,” she said in the same slow, evenly paced voice. “He
had no mother, no father.”

Underhill asked if the police had ever arrested the person who beat Rosita Orosco
to death.

She shook her head very slowly, like a child vowing never to tell a secret. “Nobody
cared who did that. That woman being what she was and all. Whosoever did it could
come to the Lord. He is the eternal court of justice.”

With hallucinatory clarity, Poole remembered the torture chamber in the Tiger Balm
Gardens, the distorted half-human shapes kneeling before an imperious judge.

“And so they never found him.”

“I don’t recall that they did.”

“Your husband had no interest in the matter?”

“Of course not,” she said. “We had already done all we could.”

She had closed her eyes, and Poole changed the direction of the questions. “When did
your husband die, Mrs. Dengler?”

Her eyes opened and flashed at him. “My husband died in the year 1960.”

“And you closed the butcher shop and the church in that year?”

The weird intimidating light had gone on in her face again. “A little bit before that.
Manny was too young to be a butcher.”

Couldn’t you see him?
Poole wanted to ask.
Couldn’t you see what a gift he was to you, no matter where he came from?

“Manny didn’t have friends,” she said, speaking almost as if she had heard Poole’s
thoughts. Some emotion swelling in her voice caught in Poole’s inner ear, and it was
not until her next sentence that he identified it as pride. “He had too much to do,
he followed Karl that way. We kept the boy busy, you must keep your children at their
tasks. Yes.
At their tasks.
For that is how they will learn. When Karl was a boy, he had no friends. I kept Manny
away from other boys and raised him in the way we knew was right. And when he was
bad we did what Scripture says to do.” She raised her head and looked straight at
Maggie. “We had to thrash his mother out of him. Well. Yes. We could have changed
his name, you know. We could have given him a good German name. But he had to know
he was half
Manuel Orosco
, even if the other half could become
Dengler.
And
Manuel Orosco
had to be tamed and put in chains. No matter what anybody said. You do this out of
love and you do it because you have to. Let me show you how it worked. Look at this,
now.”

She flipped through pages of photographs, staring down at them with a rapt, abstracted
face. Poole wished he could see all the photographs in that book. From where he sat,
he thought he caught glimpses of bonfires and big flags, but he saw only blurred fragments
of images.

“Yes,” she said. “There. You see this, you know. A boy doing a man’s job.”

She held up a newspaper clipping preserved behind the transparent sheet the way her
furniture was preserved beneath the plastic covers.

Milwaukee Journal, September 20, 1958
was written in ink at the top of the page. Beneath the photograph was the caption:
BUTCHER’S BOY
: Little eight-year-old Manny Dengler helping out in Dad’s Muffin Street shop. Dresses
deer all by himself! This is believed to be a record.

And there, in between, occupying half a page in the old album, was the photograph
of a small black-haired boy facing the camera in a bloody apron so much too big for
him that it laps around him twice and encases him like a sausage skin. In his raised
right hand, attached to his skinny angular eight-year-old’s
arm, is a massive cleaver. The photographer has told him to hold up the cleaver, for
the instrument is too large for both his hand and the job spread out neatly before
him. It is the headless body of a deer, stripped of its skin and cut neatly into sections,
shoulders, the long graceful ribcage, the curved flanks, the wide wet haunches like
a woman’s. The little boy’s face is Dengler’s, and it wears a piercing expression
which mingles sweetness and doubt.

“He could be good,” his mother said. “Here is the proof. Youngest boy in the State
of Wisconsin to dress a deer all by himself.” Her face flickered for a moment, and
Poole wondered if she were experiencing or even just remembering grief. He felt scorched:
as if he had been swallowing fire.

“If they let him stay at home instead of taking him away to be with you and fight
a war with—” A blast of ice at Maggie. “If not for that, he could be working in the
shop right now, and I could have the old age I earned. Instead of
this.
This pauper’s existence. The government stole him. Didn’t they know why we got him
in the first place?”

Now they were all included in her scorn. Her eyes snapped, and the color came up into
her face and faded out again, like an optical illusion. “After what they said,” she
said, almost to herself. “That’s the beauty part. After what they said, they were
the ones who killed him.”

“What did they say?” Poole asked.

She froze him now with a blast from her eyes.

Poole stood up and learned that his knees were shaking. The fire he had swallowed
still burned all the way down his throat.

Before he could speak, Underhill asked if they could see the boy’s room.

The old woman rose. “They stole him,” she said, still glaring at Maggie. “Everyone
lied about us.”

“The army lied when Manny was drafted?” Poole asked.

Her gaze moved to him, filled with scorn and illumination. “It wasn’t just the army,”
she said.

“Manny’s room?” Underhill asked again into the strange cold frost the woman created
about her.

“Of course,” she said, actually smiling down. “You’ll see. None of the others did.
Come this way.”

She turned around and stumped out of the room. Poole imagined spiders fleeing back
up into the corners of their webs, rats scurrying into their holes, as her footsteps
thumped toward them.

“We go upstairs, so,” she said, and led them out into the hall
and toward the staircase. The odor of must and wood rot was much stronger in the hallway.
Every stair creaked, and brown irregular rust stains spread out from the heads of
the nails that fastened the linoleum to the treads.

“He had his own room, he had everything the best,” she said. “Down the hall from us.
We could have put him in the basement, and we could have put him in the back of the
butcher shop. But the child’s place is near his parents. This is one thing I know:
the child’s place is near his parents. You see. The apple was near the tree. Karl
could see the boy at any time. Every healthy child must be punished as well as praised.”

The roofline narrowed the upper corridor to a walkway where Poole and Underhill had
to bend their necks. At the end of the narrow corridor a single window, grey with
dust and watermarks, gave a view of telephone lines capped with runners of snow. Mrs.
Dengler opened the second of the two wooden doors. “This was Manny’s,” she said, and
stood by the door like a museum guide as they entered.

It was like walking into a closet. The room was perhaps eight feet by ten feet, much
darker than the rest of the house. Poole reached out for the switch and flipped it,
but no light came on. Then he saw the cord and empty socket dangling from the ceiling.
The window had been boarded up with two-by-fours, and looked like a rectangular wooden
box. For a mad second Poole thought that Dengler’s mother was going to slam the door
and lock the three of them inside the windowless little chamber—then they would be
truly inside Dengler’s childhood. But Helga Dengler was standing beside the open door,
looking down with pursed lips, indifferent to what they saw or what they thought.

The room could have changed only very little since Dengler had left it. There was
a narrow bed covered with an army surplus blanket. A child’s desk stood against the
wall, a child’s bookshelf beside it with a few volumes leaning on its shelves. Poole
bent over the books and grunted with surprise. Red-bound copies of
Babar
and
Babar the King
, identical to the ones in the trunk of his car, stood on the top shelf. Maggie came
up to him and said “Oh!” when she saw the books.

“We didn’t stop the boy from reading, don’t think we did,” said Mrs. Dengler.

The shelves provided a graph of his reading—from
Grimm’s Fairy Tales
and
Babar
to Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov.
Tom Sawyer
and
Huckleberry Finn.
A toy car sat beside these books, two of its wheels gone and most of its paint worn
off with
handling. Books on fossils, birds, and snakes. A small number of religious tracts,
and a pocket-sized Bible.

“He spent all day up here, when we let him,” said the old woman. “Lazy, he was. Or
would have been, if we had let him be that way.”

The little room seemed unbearably claustrophobic to Poole. He wished he could put
his arms around the little boy who had escaped into this windowless chamber and tell
him that he was not bad, not lazy, not damned.

“My son loved Babar too,” he said.

“No substitute for Scripture,” she said. “As you can plainly tell by where these came
from.” In response to Poole’s look, she said, “His mother. She bought those elephant
books. Stole them, more likely. As if a baby could ever read such a big book. Had
them right with her, right there in the hospital, and she left them behind with the
baby when she took off. Throw them out, I said, they’re garbage garbage garbage, just
like where they came from, but Karl said no, let the boy have something of his natural
mother—”
unnatural
mother, “I said, and the sour will soon spoil the sweet, but Karl wanted it and so
it was. Books like those vanished from the church’s rummage box, but they were different
copies—Karl knew.”

Poole wondered if she really took him in at all, or if she saw purple marbles ready
to be cracked in the pan and glued into endless repetitions of the same pattern. Then
he saw that she would not enter the room. She wanted to come in and pull them out,
but her legs would not carry her inside, her feet would not move across the threshold.

“…  looked and looked at those books, the boy did. Won’t find anything in there, I
told him. That’s foolishness. Elephants can’t help you, I said, that’s trash, and
trash ends up in the gutter, I told him. And he knew what I was talking about. Yes.
He knew.”

“I think we could leave now,” Underhill said. Maggie muttered something Poole did
not catch—he realized that he had just been staring at Helga Dengler, who was facing
him but looking at a scene visible only to her.