Koko

“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.”

“I got it right, huh?” the driver said. “What do I win? You guys are from ‘Wheel of Fortune,’ right?”

“Are you serious?” Beevers asked.

“I asked first,” said the driver.

“No, I wanted to know—” Beevers began, but Conor told him to shut up.

The cabdriver smirked to himself the rest of the way to Constitution Avenue. “This is close enough,” Beevers said. “Pull over.”

“I thought you wanted the Memorial.”

“I said, pull over.”

The cabbie swerved to the side of the road and jerked to a stop. “Could you arrange for me to meet Vanna White?” he asked into the mirror.

“Get stuffed,” Beevers said, and jumped out of the cab. “Pay him, Tina.” He held the door until Pumo and Linklater left the car, then slammed it shut. “I hope you didn’t tip that asshole,” he said.

Pumo shrugged.

“Then you’re an asshole too.” Beevers turned away and stomped off in the direction of the Memorial.

Poole hurried to catch up with him.

“So what did I say?” Beevers asked, almost snarling. “I didn’t say anything wrong. The guy was a jerk, that’s all. I should have kicked his teeth in.”

“Calm down, Harry.”

“You heard what he said to me, didn’t you?”

“He called Pumo a pimp,” Michael said.

“Tina’s a food pimp,” Beevers said.

“Slow down, or we’ll lose the others.”

Beevers whirled about to await Tina and Conor, who were about thirty feet behind. Conor looked up and smiled at them.

Beevers tilted his head toward Michael and half-whispered, “Didn’t you ever get tired of baby-sitting those two guys?” Then he yelled at Pumo, “Did you tip that shithead?”

Pumo kept a straight face. “A pittance.”

Poole said, “The cabdriver I got yesterday wanted to ask me how it felt to kill someone.”

“ ‘How does it feel to kill someone?’ ” Beevers said in a mocking, high-pitched voice. “I can’t stand that question. Let them kill somebody, if they really want to find out.” He felt better already. The other two came up to them. “Well, we know we’re a unit anyway, don’t we?”

“We’re savage killers,” Pumo said.

Conor asked, “Who the fuck is Vanna White?” and Pumo cracked up.

*  *  *

By the time the four of them got within a hundred yards of the Memorial they were part of a crowd. The men and women streaming from the sidewalk across the grass might have been the same people Poole had seen the day before—vets wearing mismatched parts of uniforms, older men in VFW garrison caps, women Poole’s age gripping the hands of dazed-looking children. Harry Beevers’ chalk-striped lawyer’s suit made him look like a frustrated, rather superior tour guide.

“What a bunch of losers we are, when you come down to it,” Beevers spoke into Poole’s ear.

Poole said nothing—he was watching two men make their way across the grass. One, nearly six-five and skinny as a pipe-stem, leaned against a metal crutch and in wide arcs swung a rigid leg that must also have been metal; his bearded companion, imprisoned in a wooden wheelchair, had to hoist his body off the seat every time he pushed the wheels. The two men were calmly talking and laughing as they moved toward the Memorial.

“Did you find Cotton’s name yesterday?” Pumo asked, breaking into his thoughts in a way that seemed to extend them.

Poole shook his head. “Let’s find him today.”

“Hell, let’s find everybody,” Conor said. “What else are we here for?”

4

Pumo listed all the names and their panel locations on the back of an American Express slip. Dengler, 14 West, line 52—Poole remembered that one. Cotton, 13 West, line 73 … Trotman, 13 West, line 18. Peters, 14 West, line 38. And Huebsch, Hannapin, Recht. And Burrage, Washington, Tiano. And Rowley, Thomas Chambers, the only man in their company killed at Ia Thuc. And the victims of Elvis, the swivel-hipped sniper: Lowry, Montegna, Blevins. And more after that. Pumo’s tiny, neat handwriting covered the back of the green American Express slip.

They stood on the stone slabs of the path, looking up together at the names etched into polished black granite. Conor wept before Dengler’s name, and both Conor and Pumo had tears on their faces as they looked at the medic’s name: PETERS, NORMAN CHARLES.

“Goddamn,” Conor said. “Right now, Peters ought to be on top of a tractor, worried that he ain’t going to get enough rain.” Peters’ family had worked the same Kansas farmland for four generations, and the medic had let everyone know that while he temporarily enjoyed being their medical corpsman, sometimes in the night he could smell his fields in Kansas. (“You be smelling Spitalny, not Kansas,” SP4 Cotton said.) Now his brothers worked Peters’ fields, and whatever was left of Peters, Norman Charles, after the helicopter on which he’d been giving plasma to Recht, Herbert Wilson, had crashed and burned was beneath the doubtless fertile soil of a country cemetery.

“He’d just be bitching about how the government is giving a royal screwing to him and all the other farmers,” Beevers said.

Michael Poole saw a huge golden-fringed flag ruffling in the breeze off to his right, and remembered glimpsing the same flag yesterday. A tall wild-haired man held the flag anchored to his wide belt—beside him, nearly obscured by a glistening wreath, stood a round white sign lettered in red: NO GREATER LOVE. Poole thought he’d read that the wild-haired ex-Marine had been standing in the same place for two days straight.

“You see the story about that guy in the paper this morning?” Pumo said. “He’s holding the flag in honor of POWs and MIAs.”

“It won’t bring them back any quicker,” Beevers said.

“I don’t think that’s the point,” Pumo told him.

In that instant, the long black length of the Memorial announced itself—to Poole it was as if it had just spoken and taken a step toward him. Michael remembered this from his first visit. He moved very slightly away from the others. The world was a blur. Once Poole had stood for hours up to his waist in water swarming with leeches, holding his M-16 and his Claymores out of the water until his arms ached, turned to lead, died.… Rowley, Thomas Chambers was standing beside him, also holding his arsenal out of the stinking water.