Peter Straub - Koko

They found Manly bulling through the curtain of green, hacking away with his machete in one hand, his M-16 at his hip in the other. Conor started to glide up to him, half-thinking about slitting his throat, when Dengler simply materialized next to Manly and grabbed his machete arm. For a second they were motionless. Conor crept forward, afraid that Manly would shriek after the numbness wore off. Instead, he heard a single report from off to his right, somewhere up in the canopy, and saw Dengler topple over. He felt shock so deep and sudden his hands and feet went cold.

He and Manly had walked Dengler back to the rest of the column. Even though the impact had knocked him down and he was bleeding steadily, Dengler’s wound was only superficial. A wad of flesh the size of a mouse had been punched out of his left arm. Peters made him lie down on the jungle floor, packed and bandaged the wound, and pronounced him fit to move.

If Dengler had not been wounded even so slightly, Conor thought, Ia Thuc might have been just another empty village. Seeing Dengler in pain had soured everybody. It pumped up their anxiety. Maybe they had all been foolish to believe in Dengler as they had, but seeing him bloodied and wounded on the forest floor had shocked Conor all over again – it was as bad as seeing him hit in the first place. After that, it had been easy to blow it, go over the edge in Ia Thuc. Afterward nothing was the same. Even Dengler changed, maybe because of the publicity and the court martial. Conor himself had stayed so high on drugs that he still could not remember some things that had happened in the months between Ia Thuc and his DEROS – but he knew that just before the court-martials he had cut the ears off a dead North Vietnamese soldier and stuck a Koko card in his mouth.

Conor realized that he was in danger of getting depressed again. He was sorry he had ever mentioned Manly.

‘Refill,’ he said, and went to the table and poured more vodka into his glass. The other three were still looking at him, smiling at their cheerleader – other people always counted on him to provide their good times.

‘Hey, to the Ninth Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment.’ Conor swallowed another ice-cold bullet of vodka, and the face of Harlan Huebsch popped into his mind. Harlan Huebsch was a kid from Oregon who had tripped a wire and blown himself in half a few days after turning up at Camp Crandall. Conor could remember Huebsch’s death very clearly because an hour or so afterwards, when they had finally reached the other side of the little mined field, Conor had stretched out against a grassy dike and noticed a long tangled strand of wire snagged in the bootlaces on his right foot. The only difference between himself and Huebsch was that Huebsch’s mine had worked the way it was supposed to. Now Harlan Huebsch was a name up on the Memorial – Conor promised himself he’d find it, once they all got there.

Beevers wanted to toast the Tin Man, and though everybody joined him, Linklater knew that only Beans meant it. Mike Poole toasted Si Van Vo, which Conor thought was hilarious. Then Conor made everybody drink to Elvis. And Tina Pumo wound up toasting Dawn Cucchio, who was a whore he met on R&R in Sydney, Australia. Conor laughed so hard at the idea of drinking to Dawn Cucchio that he had to lean against the wall to hold himself up.

But then murkier, darker feelings surfaced in him again. If you wanted to accept the reality of what was going on, he was an unemployed laborer sitting around with a lawyer, a doctor, and a guy who owned a restaurant so fancy there were pictures of it in magazines.

Conor realized that he had been staring at Pumo, who looked like a page out of GQ. Tina always looked good, especially in his restaurant. Conor went there once or twice a year, but spent most of his money at the bar. On his last visit he had seen a juicy little Chinese girl who must have been Maggie. ‘Hey, Tina, what’s the best dish you make, down there in your restaurant?’

Conor slurred a little on best , but he didn’t think the others could hear it.

‘Duck Saigon, probably,’ Tina said. ‘At least, that’s my favorite right now. Marinated roast duck, dried rice noodles. The taste is out of sight.’

‘You put that fish sauce on top of it?’

‘Nuoc mam sauce? Sure.’

‘I don’t know how anybody can eat that gook food,’ Conor said. ‘Remember when we were over there? We all knew you couldn’t eat that shit, man.’

‘We were eighteen years old back then,’ Tina said. ‘Our idea of a great meal was a Whopper and fries.’

Conor did not admit to Tina that a Whopper and fries was still his idea of a great meal. He gulped down another silver bullet of vodka and felt lower than ever.

But in a little while it was almost like the old days again. Conor learned that along with all the normal Pumo difficulties, Tina now had to deal with the exciting new complications caused by Maggie being nearly twenty years younger and not only as crazy as he was, but smarter besides. When she moved in with him, Tina began feeling ‘too much pressure.’ This much was absolutely typical. What was different about Maggie was that after a few months she disappeared. Now she was out-Pumoing Pumo. Maggie called him on the telephone, but refused to tell him where she was staying. Sometimes she placed coded messages for him on the back page of the Village Voice.

‘Do you know what it’s like to read the back page of every issue of the Voice when you’re forty-one?’ Pumo asked.

Conor had never read any page of any issue of the Village Voice. He shook his head.

‘Every mistake you ever made with a woman is right there in cold hard print. Falling for someone’s looks – “Beautiful blonde girl in Virginia Woolf T-shirt at Sedutto’s, we almost talked and now I’m kicking myself. I know we could be special. Please call man with backpack. 581-4901.” Romantic idealization – “Suki. You are my shooting star. Cannot live without you. Bill.” Romantic despair – “I haven’t stopped hurting since you left. Forlorn in Yorkville.” Masochism – “Bruiser – No guilt necessary, I forgive you. Puffball.” Cuteness – “Twinky-poo. Twiddles wuvs yum-yum.” Indecision – “Mesquite. Still thinking. Margarita.” Of course there’s a lot of other stuff, too. Prayers to St Jude. Numbers you can call if you want to get off coke. Baldness cures. Lots of Strip-O-Grams. And Jews For Jesus, every single week. But mainly it’s all these broken hearts, this terrible early-twenties agony. Conor, I have to pore over this back page like it was the Rosetta stone. I get the damn paper as soon as it hits the stands on Wednesday morning. I read the page over four or five times because it’s easy to miss clues the first couple of times. See, I have to figure out which messages are hers. Sometimes she calls herself “Type A” – that’s Taipei, where she was born – but other times she’s “Leather Lady.” Or “Half Moon” – that was for a tattoo she got last year.’

‘Where?’ Conor asked. He didn’t feel so bad now, only a little drunk. At least he wasn’t as fucked up as Pumo. ‘On her ass?’

‘Just a little below her navel,’ Tina said. He looked as though he was sorry he had brought up the subject of his girlfriend’s tattoo.

‘Maggie has a half moon tattoed on her pussy?’ Conor asked. He wished he had been in the tattoo parlor when that was going on. Even if Chinese girls weren’t Conor’s thing – they reminded him of the Dragon Lady in ‘Terry and the Pirates’ – he had to admit that Maggie was more than normally good-looking. Everything about Maggie seemed round. She somehow managed to make it seem normal to walk around in chopped-up punk hair and clothes you bought already ripped.