Koko (75 page)

“He was just a little cuckoo we took in,” she said. “We brought him into our nest,
we were godly people, we gave the boy what we had, his own room, plenty of food, everything,
and he laid it to waste.” She stepped back to let the three of them come out of her
son’s room and then stood looking at them. “I was not surprised by what happened to
Manny,” she said at what seemed
the last possible moment. “He died in the gutter too, didn’t he, just like his mother?
Karl was always too good.”

They made their way down the stairs.

“You’ll be going now,” she said, and shuffled past them toward the door.

Frigid air rolled down the hallway as they buttoned up their coats. When she smiled,
her white cheeks shifted like floured slabs. “I wish we could talk more, but I have
to get back to my work. Take care now, get all buttoned up nice.”

They stepped outside into the cold clean air.

“Bye-bye,” she called softly from the door as they went down the porch steps. “Bye-bye
now. Yes. Bye-bye.”

When they got back into the car, Maggie said she felt sick, and wanted to go back
to the Pforzheimer to lie down while the other two met Victor Spitalny’s friend at
The Polka Dot Lounge. “I need time to recover.” Poole knew what she meant.

“So that was how Dengler grew up,” Underhill said as they drove north on the frozen
streets.

“His parents bought him,” Maggie said. “He was supposed to be their slave. That poor
little boy and his Babar books.”

“What was all that stuff about ‘them’? About lying? She never explained it.”

“I have a feeling I’m going to regret this,” Underhill said, “but after we drop Maggie
off at the hotel, I’d like you to take me to the main branch of the Milwaukee library.
It’s probably downtown somewhere, fairly close to our hotel. I want to look up some
things in the Milwaukee papers. There were a lot of things that woman never explained.”

Fifteen minutes early for his meeting, Poole pulled into the crowded parking lot beside
The Polka Dot Lounge. It was a long, low gabled building that looked as if it should
have been covered with ivy and placed in a German forest instead of on this steep
gritty street leading down into the darkness of the Valley. Overhead, the long bridge
the three of them had crossed on their way to the Spitalny house resounded with traffic.
Oval lead-colored clouds that looked as solid as battleships hung motionless in the
air further down, and bright red flames wavered at the tops of columns. Neon beer
signs glowed in the tavern’s small side windows.

Poole pushed open the door and entered a long, hazy barroom. Cigarette smoke and loud
rock music eddied about him.
Men in workshirts and caps already stood two deep at the bar. A blonde waitress in
tight jeans and a down vest carried pitchers of beer and bowls of popcorn through
the tables on a platter. Booths, most of them empty, stood along the walls. The floor
was covered with sawdust, popcorn, peanut shells. The Polka Dot was a workingman’s
bar, not a puritanical neighborhood tavern with too many lights and lachrymose music.
Most of the men at the bar Poole’s age would have been in Vietnam—no college deferments
here. Poole felt more at home in his first few minutes inside the Polka Dot than at
any other time during his visit to the Midwest.

He managed to squeeze into an empty place at the far end of the bar. “Pforzheimer’s,”
he said. “I’m supposed to meet Mack Simroe here. Has he come in yet?”

“Still a little early for Mack,” the bartender said. “Take a booth, I’ll tell him
you’re here.”

Poole took a booth and sat facing the door. After fifteen minutes a huge bearded man
in a ripped down jacket and a jungle hat came through the door. The man began to scan
the booths, and Poole knew instantly that this was Mack Simroe. The giant’s eyes found
Poole, and the giant gave him a wide toothy smile from the center of his beard. Poole
stood up. The big man striding toward him was congenial and puzzled and open for anything,
all of which was visible in his face. Simroe engulfed his hand and said, “I guess
you’re Dr. Poole, Let’s get a pitcher and make Jenny’s life a little easier, what
do you say, this stuff is better on draft anyway.…”

And then they were facing each other in the booth with a pitcher of beer and a bowl
of popcorn between them. After being in the Dengler house, Michael felt peculiarly
sensitive to odors, and from Mack Simroe came what must have been the undiluted breath
of the Valley: a smell of machine oil and metal shavings. It would be the smell inside
one of those leaden clouds of frozen smoke. Simroe was a fitter at the Dux Company,
which manufactured ball bearings and engine parts, and he usually stopped in here
at the end of his day.

“You knocked the pins out from under me,” Simroe said, “asking about Vic Spitalny
and all that. Sorta brought back a lot of stuff.”

“I hope you don’t mind talking a little bit more about it.”

“Hey, I’d be here anyhow. Who else you been talking to?”

“His parents.”

“They heard from him?”

Poole shook his head.

“George went off the rails when Vic got in all that trouble. Started drinking too
much, and on the job too, way I heard it. Got in a lot of fights. Glax put him on
leave for a month, I guess he discovered George Wallace in all his greatness around
then. He started doing some work for Wallace and that got him back on the track. George
still won’t hear a word against Wallace. Who else you talk to? Debbie Maczik? What’s
her name now—Tusa?”

“I did.”

“Nice kid. Always liked Debbie.”

“Did you like Victor, too?” Poole asked.

Simroe leaned forward, and Poole was acutely aware of bulging forearms and his huge
head. “You know, I can’t help wondering what all this is about. I don’t mind talking
to you, buddy, not at all, but first I’d just kinda like to know the background. You
were in the same unit as Vic?”

“All the way,” Poole said.

“Dragon Valley? Ia Thuc?”

“Every step.”

“And you’re a civilian these days?”

“I’m a doctor. A baby doctor, outside New York City.”

“A baby doctor.” Simroe grinned. He liked that. “No cop, no FBI, no Intelligence or
Military Police, no goddamned CIA—no nothing.”

“No nothing.”

Simroe was still grinning. “But there’s something, isn’t there? You think the man’s
alive. You want to find him.”

“I do want to find him.”

“He must owe you a hell of a lot of money, or you heard something about the guy—something
bad. He’s involved in something, and you want to stop him.”

“That’s about it,” Poole admitted.

“So Vic is alive after all. I’ll be damned.”

“Most people who deserted are still alive. That’s why they deserted.”

“Okay,” Simroe said. “Nobody who went into that war came back exactly the same way.
You sort of think you know how far certain people will go—and maybe you don’t. Maybe
you never do.” He downed a huge quantity of beer in one swallow. “Let me tell you
how I got to know Vic. Back at Rufus King, I was kind of a half-assed hood. I had
a big Harley, boots, evil tattoos—I still got those, but I hide ’em these days—and
I tried to be a real badass. I didn’t know what else to do. I was never a real hood,
I just liked riding around on that big old bike. Anyhow, Vic started
hanging around me. Vic thought the whole biker bit was cool as shit. I couldn’t shake
him off, and after a while I just gave up trying.”

Poole thought of Spacemaker Ortega, Spitalny’s only real friend in the service and
the leader of the Devilfuckers—Spitalny had simply transferred his affection for Simroe
to Ortega.

“And then I sort of got to like him. I got to thinking—here’s this kid, kind of dumb,
his old man’s always breathing down his neck. I tried to give him advice. You gotta
take care of yourself, you little asshole, I used to tell him. I even tried to get
him to lay off Manny Dengler, ‘cause there was a guy who had real problems, I mean
who was in shit up to his neck all day every day. I mean, I used to
worry
about that little cat!”

“I saw his mother this afternoon.”

Simroe shook his shaggy head. “I never met the lady. But the old man, Karl—man, he
was something. Out there on those corners every morning, every night, yellin’ into
his little mike—little Manny singin’ some stuff, hymns or shit, top of his lungs,
and passin’ the hat. And the old man would cuff him right there on the street. It
was a show, man, a real show. Anyhow, right after I dropped out of school Vic dropped
out too—I tried to argue him back in, but he just wouldn’t go. I knew I wasn’t goin’
anywhere but the Valley, and I kind of wanted to get into uniform first, be a hero
with an M-16, do my part. You know. And you were there—you know what happened. I saw
good guys getting blown away for no reason at all. Fucked me up pretty good.”

Simroe had been in Bravo Company, Fourth Battalion, 31st Infantry, the American Division,
and he had spent a year fighting in 120-degree heat in the Hiep Due Valley, wounded
twice.

“Did you have any contact with Vic once you were both in country?”

“Just a couple letters—we were going to get together, but it never worked out.”

“Did he write to you after he deserted?”

“I knew you were going to ask that. And I oughta dump this beer over your head, baby
doctor, because I already told you I never heard from him. He just cut himself off
from everybody, I guess.”

“What do you think happened to him?”

Simroe pushed his glass through the puddles on the wet table. He looked up at Poole,
testing his judgment, then back down at his glass. “I suppose I could ask you the
same. But I’ll tell you what I think, Doctor. I think he stayed alive about a
month, tops. I think he ran out of money and tried to get into some action, and whoever
he was with killed him. Because that’s about what Vic Spitalny was good for. He was
good for screwing up. I don’t think he lasted six weeks, once he cut out on his own.
At least I didn’t think so until you showed up.”

“Do you think he killed Dengler?”

“No way,” said Simroe, looking up sharply. “Do you?”

“I’m afraid I do,” Poole said.

Simroe hesitated and opened his mouth to say something, but then an uproar broke out
at the bar and both men turned to see what had caused it. A group of young men in
their twenties and early thirties had surrounded an older man with curly hair and
the pudgy beatific face of a village fool.
“Cob,”
they were yelling, “Go, Cob!”

“Catch this,” Simroe said.

The younger men milled around the one called Cob, punching his shoulder, whispering
into his ear. Poole became aware of some bitter, familiar odor—cordite? napalm? Neither
of those, but an odor from that world.
Cob
, they said,
come on, you fucker.

The one called Cob grinned and ducked his head, pleased to be the object of so much
attention. He looked like a janitor, a broom pusher for Glax or Dux or Fluegelhorn
Brothers. His skin had an odd greyish tinge and in the curls of his hair were caught
what looked like pencil shavings.
Come on, you dumbass motherfucker. Cob! Do it!

“There are guys in here,” Simroe said, leaning across the table, “who claim they once
saw Cob lift himself a foot and a half off the floor and just hang there for thirty-forty
seconds.”

Poole looked dubiously at Simroe, and heard a loud metallic noise like a series of
backfires, or a burst from a machine gun, a
BRRRRAAAAPPPP!
that did not sound at all like a noise any human being could have produced. He looked
sideways in time to see a torpedo-shaped sheet of flame four feet long shoot out toward
the middle of the bar and disappear into itself. The cordite-and-napalm stench became
much stronger, then disappeared.

“Clears the air, doesn’t it?” Simroe said.

The younger men were banging Cob on the back, handing him bills. Cob staggered back
a step, but caught himself before he fell. One of the men put a glass of beer in his
hand, and he poured it down his throat as if dumping it into a well.

“That’s Cob’s trick,” Simroe said. “He can do that two, maybe three times a night.
Don’t ask me how. Don’t ask him either. He can’t tell you. Can’t talk—no tongue. You
know what I think? I
think the poor bastard fills his mouth up with lighter fluid before he comes in here,
and stands around waiting for someone to ask for his trick.”

“But did you ever see him light a match?”

“Never.” Simroe winked at Michael, then poured another beer. “Another guy in here
will eat his beer glass if he gets drunk enough.” He swallowed beer. “You met Dengler’s
mother, you said? She tell you anything about old Karl’s going off to jail?”

Poole’s eyes widened.

“No, I don’t suppose she did. Old Karl was arrested during our freshman year. A social
worker came around to check on the kid and found him locked in the meat locker in
the butcher shop, pretty well beat up. The old man got a little rougher with him than
usual, and put him in the meat locker to get him out of the way until he calmed down.
She called the cops, and the kid told them everything.”

“What everything?”

And Mack Simroe told him. “How his old man, old Karl, used to—well, abuse him. A couple
of times a week, starting from the time he was five or six. Used to tell him he’d
cut his pecker off if he caught him messing with girls. Manny had to go to trial and
testify against the old man. The judge sent him away for twenty years, but after he
did a couple years he got killed in jail. I think he made a move on the wrong kid.”

After what they said
, Poole remembered.
Everyone lied about us.

And:
We kept that boy busy.

And:
He had to be put in chains. No matter what anybody said.

And:
We closed the butcher shop a little bit before that.

Michael saw Dengler’s face glowing at him, uttering nonsense about the Valley of the
Shadow of Death.