Peter Straub - Koko

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.

‘Manly. Fucking Manly. And I’ll start to think about how did he manage to get all that beer there, anyway? And then I’ll start to think about little things he did, the way he acted.’

‘Manly belonged behind a counter,’ Beevers said.

‘That’s right! I bet Manly’s got his own little business right now, he’s got everything lined up just right, man, he’s got a good car and his own house, he’s got a wife, kids, he’s got one of those basketball hoops up on his garage…’ Conor stared into space for a second, enjoying his vision of Manly’s life – Manly would be great in suburbia. He thought like a criminal without actually being one, so he was probably making a fortune doing something like installing security systems. Then Conor remembered that in a way Manly had started all their troubles, back in Vietnam…

A day before they came into Ia Thuc, Manly had separated from the column and found himself alone in the jungle. Without even meaning to make noise, he started sounding like a six-foot bumblebee in a panic. Everyone else in the column froze. A sniper known as ‘Elvis’ had been dogging them for two days, and Manly’s commotion was all he needed to improve his luck. Conor knew what he should have done – he had discovered long ago how to make himself melt into the background. It was almost mystical. Conor could virtually become invisible (and he knew it worked, for twice VC patrols had looked right at him without seeing him). Dengler, Poole, Pumo, even Underhill, could do this almost as well as he could, but Manly could not do it all. Conor began silently working through the jungle toward the sound – he was angry enough to kill Manly, if that was what it took to shut him up. Within a minute fraction of a second, he knew as if by telepathy – so silent – that Dengler was following him.