Koko

Michael read on, flipping pages at the bottom of a shaft of yellow light while an incomprehensible movie played itself out on the small screen before him. Snores and belches from sleeping pediatricians now and then cut across the humming silence of the cabin. Nat Beasley makes a fortune brokering hashish in Bangkok, marries a beautiful whore from Chiang Mai, and flies back to America with a passport made out to Henry Harper. Pun Yin, or one of the other stewardesses, audibly sighed in a last-row seat.

Nat Beasley rents a car at the Detroit airport and drives to Grosse Point with the beautiful Chiang Mai whore beside him. Michael saw him seated at the wheel of the rented car, turning toward his wife as he pointed to Judge Harper’s great white house at the far end of a perfect lawn. Behind these images, accompanying them, arose others – Poole had not spent so many hours in the air since 1967 and moments from his uneasy flight into Vietnam, encased in the self-same uneasiness, twined around the adventures of Nat Beasley, the running grunt.

The strangeness of going to war on a regular commercial flight had stayed with him for the entire day they were in the air. About three-fourths of the passengers were new soldiers like himself, the rest divided between career officers and businessmen. The stewardesses had spoken to him without meeting his eyes, and their smiles had looked as temporary as winces.

Michael remembered looking at his hands and wondering if they would be limp and dead when he returned to America. Why hadn’t he gone to Canada? They didn’t shoot at you in Canada. Why hadn’t he simply stayed in school? What stupid fatalism had ruled his life?

Conor Linklater startled Michael by snapping upright in his seat. He blinked filmy eyes at Michael, said, ‘Hey, you’re poring over that book like it was the Rosetta stone,’ and leaned back, asleep again before his eyes were closed.

Nat Beasley strolls through Judge Harper’s mansion. He muses on the contents of the refrigerator. He stands in the judge’s closet and tries on the judge’s suits. His wife lies across the judge’s bed, flipping through sixty cable channels with the remote-control device.

Pun Yin stood beside Michael with her arms angelically outstretched, floating a blanket down over Conor Linklater’s body. In 1967, a girl with a blonde pageboy tapped his arm to awaken him, grinned brightly over his shoulder, and told him to prepare for descent. His guts felt watery. When the stewardess opened the door, hot moist air invaded the aircraft and Michael’s entire body began to sweat.

Nat Beasley lifts a heavy brown plastic bag from the trunk of a Lincoln town car and drops it into a deep trench between two fir trees. He takes a second, lighter bag from the trunk and drops it on top of the first.

The heat, Michael knew, would rot the shoes right off his feet.

Pun Yin switched off his reading light and closed his book.

3

The General, who was now a storefront preacher in Harlem, had left Tina alone with Maggie for a moment in the clutter of his ornate living room on 125th Street and Broadway. The General had been a friend of Maggie’s father, apparently also a general in the Formosan army, and after General Lah and his wife had been assassinated, the General had brought her to America – and this stuffy apartment in Harlem had been where Maggie had fled! It was a puzzle, a relief, an irritation.

For one thing, his girlfriend turned out to be the daughter of a general. This explained a lot about Maggie: she came by her pride naturally; she was used to getting her own way; she liked to speak in communiques; and she thought she knew all about soldiers.

‘Didn’t you think I was worried about you?’

‘You don’t mean worried about me, you mean jealous.’

‘What’s wrong with that?’

‘Because you don’t own me, Tina. And because it only works when I’m gone and you don’t know where I am. You’re like a little boy, you know?’

He let that one pass.

‘Because when I live with you, Tina, you wind up thinking that I’m this half-crazy little punk who really just gets in the way of thinking about business and hanging out with the guys.’

‘That just says that you’re jealous, Maggie.’

‘Maybe you’re not so dumb after all.’ Maggie said, and smiled at him. ‘But you have too many problems for me.’ She was sitting on an ornately brocaded couch with her legs folded under her, wrapped in some loose flowing dark woolen thing that was as Chinese as the couch. The smile made Tina want to put his arms around her. Her hair was different, less scrappy, more like a smooth thatch. Tina knew how Maggie’s heavy silky hair felt in his hands, and he wished he could ruffle it now.

‘Are you saying you don’t love me?’

‘You don’t stop loving people, Tina,’ she said. ‘But if I moved back in with you, pretty soon you’d be secretly wondering how you could get rid of me – you’re so guilty, you’ll never let yourself get married to anybody. You’ll never even get close.’

‘You want to marry me?’

‘No.’ She watched his suspicious, surprised response. ‘I said, you have too many problems for me. But that’s not the point. How you behave is the point.’

‘Okay, I’m not perfect. Is that what you want me to say? I’d like you to come back downtown with me, and you know it. But I could just as well walk away right now, and you know that too.’

‘Think about this, Tina. When I was putting all those ads in the Voice for you?’

He nodded.

‘Didn’t you like seeing them?’

He nodded again.

‘You looked for them every week?’

Tina nodded yet again.

‘Yet you never even considered putting one in yourself, did you?’

‘Is that what this is about?’

‘Not bad, Tina. I’m glad you didn’t say you were too old for that sort of thing.’

‘Maggie, a lot of things are going wrong right now.’

‘Did the city close Saigon?’

‘I closed it. It was getting to be impossible to cook and kill bugs at the same time. So I decided to concentrate on killing bugs.’

‘As long as you don’t get mixed up and start cooking them.’

Annoyed, he shook his head and said, ‘It’s costing me a ton of money. I’m still paying a lot of salaries.’

‘And you’re sorry you didn’t go to Singapore with the little boys.’

‘Let’s put it this way. I’d be having more fun than I am now.’

‘Right now?’

‘Now in general.’ He looked at her with love and exasperation, and she looked calmly back. ‘I didn’t know you wanted me to put ads in the Voice too – otherwise I would have. It never occurred to me.’

She sighed and raised a hand, then slowly let it fall back to her folded knees. ‘Forget about it. But just remember that I know you a lot better than you’ll ever know me.’ She gave him another calm look. ‘You’re worried about them, aren’t you?’

‘Okay, I’m worried about them. Maybe that’s why I wish I was with them.’

She slowly shook her head. ‘I can’t believe that you get half-killed and think that you should be able to go on the way you did before – like nothing happened.’

‘Plenty happened, I don’t mind admitting it.’

‘You’re scared, you’re scared, you’re scared!’

‘Okay, I’m scared.’ He exhaled noisily. ‘I don’t even like going out alone in the daytime. At night I hear noises. I keep thinking – well, weird shit. About Nam.’