Peter Straub - Koko

‘Actually, I heard somebody say something, can’t even remember what it was now…’

‘Yeah, me too,’ said the black man. ‘I heard somebody say “about twenty klicks from An Khe,” and I…my damn stomach just disappeared.’

‘I I Corps,’ Michael said. ‘You were a little south of me. Name’s Michael Poole, nice to meet you.’

‘Bill Pierce.’ The two men shook hands. ‘This lady here is Florence Majeski. Her son was in my unit.’

Poole had a strong, sudden desire to put his arms around the old woman, but he knew that he would break down again if he did that. He asked the first question that came to mind: ‘You get that hat off an ARVN?’

Pierce grinned. ‘Snatched it right off, riding by in a jeep. Poor little bastard.’

Then he knew what he really wanted to ask Pierce. ‘How can you find the names you’re looking for, in all this crowd?’

‘There’s Marines at both ends of the Memorial,’ Pierce said, ‘and they have books with all the names and the panels they’re on. Or you could ask one of the yellow caps. They’re just here today, on account of all the extra people.’ Pierce glanced at Mrs Majeski.

‘They had Tom right there in the book,’ the old lady said.

‘I see one over thataway,’ Pierce said, pointing off to Michael’s right. ‘He’ll find it for you.’ In the midst of a little knot of people, a tall, bearded, young white man in a yellow duckbill cap was consulting sheets in a looseleaf binder and then gesturing toward specific panels.

‘God bless you, son,’ said Mrs Majeski. ‘If you’re ever in Ironton, Pennsylvania, I want you to stop in and pay us a visit.’

‘Good luck,’ Pierce said.

‘Same to both of you.’ He smiled and turned away.

‘I mean it now!’ Mrs Majeski yelled. ‘You stop in and see us!’

Michael waved, and moved toward the man in the yellow cap. At least two dozen people had him circled, and all seemed to be leaning toward him. ‘I can only handle one at a time.’ the man with the cap said in a flat Midwestern voice. ‘Please, okay?’

Poole thought. The others ought to be at the hotel by now. This is a ridiculous gesture.

The young man in the yellow cap consulted his pages, indicated panels, wiped moisture from his forehead. Michael soon stood before him. The volunteer was wearing blue jeans and a denim shirt unsnapped halfway down over a damp grey T-shirt. His beard glistened with sweat. ‘Name,’ he said.

‘M. O. Dengler,’ Poole said.

The man riffled through his pages, located the D’s, and ran his finger down a column. ‘Here we go. The only Dengler is Dengler, Manuel Orosco, of Wisconsin. Which happens to be my home state. Panel fourteen west, line fifty-two. Right over there.’ He pointed to the right. Small poppies like red pinpoints dotted the edges of the panel, before which stood a large unmoving crowd. NO MORE VIETNAMS, announced a bright blue banner.

Manuel Orosco Dengler? The Spanish names were a surprise. A sudden thought stopped Michael as he made his way toward the blue banner through the crowd: the guide had given him the wrong Dengler. Then he remembered that the guide had said that this was the only Dengler. And the initials were right. Manuel Orosco had to be his Dengler.

Poole was directly in front of the Memorial once again. His shoulder touched the shoulder of a shaggy-haired, weeping vet with a handlebar moustache. Beside him a woman with white blonde hair to the waist of her blue jeans held the hand of a little girl, also blonde. A child without a father, as he was now forever a father without a child. On the other side of the broken strip of sod, planted with flags and wreaths and photographs of young soldiers stapled to wooden sticks, the four-teenth panel, west, loomed before him. Poole counted down until he reached the fifty-second line. The name of M.O. Dengler, MANUEL OROSCO DENGLER, etched in black polished granite, jumped out at him. Poole admired the surgical dignity of the engraving, the unadorned clarity of the letters. He knew that he had never had any choice about standing in front of Dengler’s name.

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.