Koko

In bed, Michael read a few pages of the Stephen King novel he had packed. Conor Linklater complained and snuffled on the other side of the bed. Nothing in the novel seemed more than slightly odder or more threatening than events in ordinary life. Improbability and violence overflowed from ordinary life, and Stephen King seemed to know that.

Before Michael could turn off his light, he was dripping with sweat, carrying his copy of The Dead Zone through an army base many times larger than Camp Crandall. All around the camp, twenty or thirty kilometers beyond the barbed-wire perimeter, stood hills once thickly covered by trees, now so perfectly bombed and burned and defoliated that only charred sticks protruded upwards from powdery brown earth. He walked past a row of empty tents and at last heard the silence of the camp – he was alone. The camp had been abandoned, and he had been left behind. A flagless flagpole stood before the company headquarters. He trudged past the deserted building into a stretch of empty land and smelled burning shit. Then he knew that this was no dream, he really was in Vietnam – the rest of his life was the dream. Poole never smelled things in his dreams. He didn’t think he even dreamed in color most of the time. Poole turned around and saw an old Vietnamese woman looking at him expressionlessly from beside an oil drum filled with burning kerosene-soaked excrement. Dense black smoke boiled up from the drum and smudged the sky. His despair was flat and unsurprising.

Wait a second, he thought, if this is reality it’s no later than 1969. He opened The Dead Zone to the page of published information. Deep in his chest, his heart deflated like a punctured balloon. The copyright date was 1965. He had never left Vietnam. Everything since had been only a nineteenyear-old’s wishful dream.

5 Beans Beevers at the Memorial (#ulink_8a1412d4-2f25-5b30-b253-827b078a26c1)

1

Poole awoke with a fading memory of smoke and noise, of artillery fire and uniformed men running in a cartoonish lockstep through a burning village. He pushed this vision into forgetfulness with unconscious expertise. His first real thought was that he would stop off at Walden Books in Westerholm and buy a book for a twelve-year-old patient named Stacy Talbot before visiting her in St Bartholomew’s Hospital. Then he remembered that he was in Washington. His second fully formed thought was to wonder if Tim Underhill was really still alive. He had a brief vision of himself standing in a neat graveyard in Singapore, looking down with both loss and relief at Underbill’s headstone.

Or was Underhill simmering in craziness, still back in the war?

Conor Linklater seemed to have vanished and left behind a crushed pillow and a wildly wrinkled counterpane. Poole crawled across the bed and peered over the far edge. Curled up into himself like a cabbage leaf, his mouth lax and his eyelids stretched unmoving across his eyes, Conor lay asleep on the floor.

Michael pushed himself back across the bed and went quietly into the bathroom to shower.

‘Jeez,’ Conor said when Michael came out of the bathroom. He was sitting in one of the chairs and holding his head in both hands. ‘What time is it, anyhow?’

‘About ten-thirty.’ Poole took underwear and socks from his bag and began dressing.

‘Blackout, man,’ Conor said. ‘Total hangover.’ He peeked out through his fingers at Poole. ‘How’d I end up here, anyhow?’

‘I sort of assisted you.’

‘Thanks, man,’ Linklater groaned. His head sank again into his hands. ‘I gotta turn over a new lease on life. I been partying too much lately, getting old, gotta slow down. Whoo.’ He straightened up and looked around the room as if he were lost. ‘Where’s my clothes?’

‘Pumo’s room,’ Michael said, buttoning his shirt.

‘Well, I don’t know. I left all my shit up there. I sure wish he’d come along with us, man, don’t you? Pumo the Puma. He oughta come along. Hey, Mikey, can I use your bathroom and your shower before I go back upstairs?’

‘Oh dear,’ Poole said. ‘I just got it all cleaned up for the maid.’

Conor left the couch and moved across the room in a fashion that Poole associated with recovering stroke victims in geriatric wards. When Conor got to the bathroom he leaned on the door-knob and coughed. His hair was standing up in little orange spikes. ‘Am I crazy, or did Beans say he’d loan me a couple thousand bucks?’

Poole nodded.

‘Do you think he meant it?’

Poole nodded again.

‘I’ll never figure that guy out, I guess,’ Conor said, and slammed the bathroom door behind him.

After he pushed his feet into his loafers, Poole went to the telephone and dialed Judy’s number. She did not answer, nor did her machine. Poole hung up.

A few minutes later Beevers called down to inform Michael and Conor that he was offering room-service breakfast for everybody in his suite (en suite), commencing in thirty minutes at eleven hundred hours, and that Michael had better get hopping if he wanted more than one Bloody Mary.

‘More than one?’

‘I guess you didn’t get the kind of exercise I had last night.’ Beevers gloated. ‘A lovely lady, the kind I was telling you about, left about an hour or two ago, and I’m as mellow as a month in the country. Michael – try to persuade Pumo that there are more important things in the world than his restaurant, will you?’ He hung up before Poole could respond.

2

Beevers’ suite had not only a long living room with sliding windows onto a substantial balcony but was equipped with a dining room where Michael, Pumo, and Beevers sat at a round table laden with plates of food, baskets of rolls, racks of toast, pitchers of Bloody Marys, chafing dishes holding sausages, bacon, and eggs Benedict.

From the couch in the living room where he sat hunched over a cup of black coffee, Conor said, ‘I’ll eat something later.’

‘Mangia, mangia. Keep your strength up for our trip.’ Beevers waggled a fork dripping egg yolk and Hollandaise sauce. His black hair gleamed and his eyes shone. His white shirt had been fresh from its wrapping when Beevers had rolled up his sleeves and his soberly striped bow tie was perfectly knotted. The dark blue suit jacket draped over the back of his chair had a broad chalky stripe. He looked as though he expected to be standing before the Supreme Court instead of the Vietnam Memorial.

‘You’re still serious about that?’ Pumo asked.

‘Aren’t you? Tina, we need you – how could we do this without you?’

‘You’re going to have to try,’ Pumo said. ‘But isn’t the question academic anyhow?’

‘Not to me, it isn’t,’ Beevers said. ‘How about you, Conor? You think I’m just kidding around?’

The three men at the table looked down the length of the living room toward Conor. Startled at being the object of everyone’s attention, he straightened himself up. ‘Not if you’re loaning me the air fare, you’re not,’ he said. ‘Kidding, that is.’

Beevers was now quizzing Michael with his annoyingly clear, annoyingly amused eyes. ‘And you? Was sagen Sie, Michael?’

‘Do you ever exactly kid around, Harry?’ Michael asked, unwilling to be a counter in Harry Beevers’ newest game.

Beevers was still gleaming at him, waiting for more because he knew he was going to get it.

‘I suppose I’m tempted, Harry,’ he said, and caught Pumo’s sidelong glance.

3

‘Just out of curiosity,’ Harry Beevers leaned forward to say to the cabdriver, ‘how do the four of us strike you? What sort of impression do you have of us as a group?’

‘You serious?’ the cabbie asked, and turned to Poole, seated beside him on the front seat. ‘Is this guy serious?’

Poole nodded, and Beevers said, ‘Go on. Lay it on the line. I’m curious.’

The driver looked at Beevers in the mirror, looked back at the road, then glanced back over his shoulder at Pumo and Linklater. The driver was an unshaven, blubbery man in his mid-fifties. Whenever he made even the smallest movement, Poole caught the mingled odors of dried sweat and burning electrical circuits.

‘You guys don’t fit together at all, no way,’ the driver said. He looked suspiciously over at Poole. ‘Hey, if this is “Candid Camera” or some shit like that, you can get out now.’

‘What do you mean, we don’t fit together?’ Beevers asked. ‘We’re a unit!’

‘Here’s what I see.’ The driver glanced again at his mirror. ‘You look like some kind of bigshot lawyer, maybe a lobbyist or some other kind of guy who starts out in life by stealing from the collection plate. The guy next to you looks like a pimp, and the guy next to him is a working stiff with a hangover. This one here next to me, he looks like he teaches high school.’

‘A pimp!’ Pumo howled.

‘So sue me,’ said the driver. ‘You asked.’

‘I am a working stiff with a hangover.’ Conor said. ‘And face it, Tina, you are a pimp.’