Koko

“Manny did not have a mother,” she said in the same slow, evenly paced voice. “He had no mother, no father.”

Underhill asked if the police had ever arrested the person who beat Rosita Orosco to death.

She shook her head very slowly, like a child vowing never to tell a secret. “Nobody cared who did that. That woman being what she was and all. Whosoever did it could come to the Lord. He is the eternal court of justice.”

With hallucinatory clarity, Poole remembered the torture chamber in the Tiger Balm Gardens, the distorted half-human shapes kneeling before an imperious judge.

“And so they never found him.”

“I don’t recall that they did.”

“Your husband had no interest in the matter?”

“Of course not,” she said. “We had already done all we could.”

She had closed her eyes, and Poole changed the direction of the questions. “When did your husband die, Mrs. Dengler?”

Her eyes opened and flashed at him. “My husband died in the year 1960.”

“And you closed the butcher shop and the church in that year?”

The weird intimidating light had gone on in her face again. “A little bit before that. Manny was too young to be a butcher.”

Couldn’t you see him? Poole wanted to ask. Couldn’t you see what a gift he was to you, no matter where he came from?

“Manny didn’t have friends,” she said, speaking almost as if she had heard Poole’s thoughts. Some emotion swelling in her voice caught in Poole’s inner ear, and it was not until her next sentence that he identified it as pride. “He had too much to do, he followed Karl that way. We kept the boy busy, you must keep your children at their tasks. Yes. At their tasks. For that is how they will learn. When Karl was a boy, he had no friends. I kept Manny away from other boys and raised him in the way we knew was right. And when he was bad we did what Scripture says to do.” She raised her head and looked straight at Maggie. “We had to thrash his mother out of him. Well. Yes. We could have changed his name, you know. We could have given him a good German name. But he had to know he was half Manuel Orosco, even if the other half could become Dengler. And Manuel Orosco had to be tamed and put in chains. No matter what anybody said. You do this out of love and you do it because you have to. Let me show you how it worked. Look at this, now.”

She flipped through pages of photographs, staring down at them with a rapt, abstracted face. Poole wished he could see all the photographs in that book. From where he sat, he thought he caught glimpses of bonfires and big flags, but he saw only blurred fragments of images.

“Yes,” she said. “There. You see this, you know. A boy doing a man’s job.”

She held up a newspaper clipping preserved behind the transparent sheet the way her furniture was preserved beneath the plastic covers.

Milwaukee Journal, September 20, 1958 was written in ink at the top of the page. Beneath the photograph was the caption: BUTCHER’S BOY: Little eight-year-old Manny Dengler helping out in Dad’s Muffin Street shop. Dresses deer all by himself! This is believed to be a record.

And there, in between, occupying half a page in the old album, was the photograph of a small black-haired boy facing the camera in a bloody apron so much too big for him that it laps around him twice and encases him like a sausage skin. In his raised right hand, attached to his skinny angular eight-year-old’s arm, is a massive cleaver. The photographer has told him to hold up the cleaver, for the instrument is too large for both his hand and the job spread out neatly before him. It is the headless body of a deer, stripped of its skin and cut neatly into sections, shoulders, the long graceful ribcage, the curved flanks, the wide wet haunches like a woman’s. The little boy’s face is Dengler’s, and it wears a piercing expression which mingles sweetness and doubt.

“He could be good,” his mother said. “Here is the proof. Youngest boy in the State of Wisconsin to dress a deer all by himself.” Her face flickered for a moment, and Poole wondered if she were experiencing or even just remembering grief. He felt scorched: as if he had been swallowing fire.

“If they let him stay at home instead of taking him away to be with you and fight a war with—” A blast of ice at Maggie. “If not for that, he could be working in the shop right now, and I could have the old age I earned. Instead of this. This pauper’s existence. The government stole him. Didn’t they know why we got him in the first place?”

Now they were all included in her scorn. Her eyes snapped, and the color came up into her face and faded out again, like an optical illusion. “After what they said,” she said, almost to herself. “That’s the beauty part. After what they said, they were the ones who killed him.”

“What did they say?” Poole asked.

She froze him now with a blast from her eyes.

Poole stood up and learned that his knees were shaking. The fire he had swallowed still burned all the way down his throat.

Before he could speak, Underhill asked if they could see the boy’s room.

The old woman rose. “They stole him,” she said, still glaring at Maggie. “Everyone lied about us.”

“The army lied when Manny was drafted?” Poole asked.

Her gaze moved to him, filled with scorn and illumination. “It wasn’t just the army,” she said.

“Manny’s room?” Underhill asked again into the strange cold frost the woman created about her.

“Of course,” she said, actually smiling down. “You’ll see. None of the others did. Come this way.”

She turned around and stumped out of the room. Poole imagined spiders fleeing back up into the corners of their webs, rats scurrying into their holes, as her footsteps thumped toward them.

“We go upstairs, so,” she said, and led them out into the hall and toward the staircase. The odor of must and wood rot was much stronger in the hallway. Every stair creaked, and brown irregular rust stains spread out from the heads of the nails that fastened the linoleum to the treads.

“He had his own room, he had everything the best,” she said. “Down the hall from us. We could have put him in the basement, and we could have put him in the back of the butcher shop. But the child’s place is near his parents. This is one thing I know: the child’s place is near his parents. You see. The apple was near the tree. Karl could see the boy at any time. Every healthy child must be punished as well as praised.”

The roofline narrowed the upper corridor to a walkway where Poole and Underhill had to bend their necks. At the end of the narrow corridor a single window, grey with dust and watermarks, gave a view of telephone lines capped with runners of snow. Mrs. Dengler opened the second of the two wooden doors. “This was Manny’s,” she said, and stood by the door like a museum guide as they entered.

It was like walking into a closet. The room was perhaps eight feet by ten feet, much darker than the rest of the house. Poole reached out for the switch and flipped it, but no light came on. Then he saw the cord and empty socket dangling from the ceiling. The window had been boarded up with two-by-fours, and looked like a rectangular wooden box. For a mad second Poole thought that Dengler’s mother was going to slam the door and lock the three of them inside the windowless little chamber—then they would be truly inside Dengler’s childhood. But Helga Dengler was standing beside the open door, looking down with pursed lips, indifferent to what they saw or what they thought.

The room could have changed only very little since Dengler had left it. There was a narrow bed covered with an army surplus blanket. A child’s desk stood against the wall, a child’s bookshelf beside it with a few volumes leaning on its shelves. Poole bent over the books and grunted with surprise. Red-bound copies of Babar and Babar the King, identical to the ones in the trunk of his car, stood on the top shelf. Maggie came up to him and said “Oh!” when she saw the books.

“We didn’t stop the boy from reading, don’t think we did,” said Mrs. Dengler.

The shelves provided a graph of his reading—from Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Babar to Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. A toy car sat beside these books, two of its wheels gone and most of its paint worn off with handling. Books on fossils, birds, and snakes. A small number of religious tracts, and a pocket-sized Bible.

“He spent all day up here, when we let him,” said the old woman. “Lazy, he was. Or would have been, if we