Koko Read online

  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.”

  2

  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.

  1

  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.’ ”

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

  2

  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 hi
s 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.