Koko

slash in the lieutenant’s throat has sheeted down over his trunk, staining his chest solidly red.

“Dengler!” Conor says in his dream. “Dengler, look at the lieutenant! That asshole got us into this mess and now he’s dead!”

Another great light burst in the sky, and Conor sees a Koko card protruding from Lieutenant Beevers’ mouth.

Conor touches Dengler’s shoulder and Dengler’s body rolls over onto his legs and Conor sees Dengler’s mutilated face and the Koko card in his gaping mouth. He screams in both the dream and real life and wakes up.

Conor got to work early and waited outside for the others. A few minutes later Ben Roehm pulled up in his Blazer with the two other members of the crew who lived up in his part of the state. They were men with babies and rent to pay, but too young to have been in Vietnam. As he watched them get out of the cab, Conor realized that he felt surprisingly paternal toward these sturdy young carpenters—they didn’t have enough experience to know the difference between Ben Roehm and most of the other contractors around.

“Okay this morning, Red?” Roehm asked.

“Right as the dew, man.”

Woyzak pulled up a moment later in a long car that had been covered with black primer and stripped of all exterior ornaments, even door handles.

Once they went to work, Conor noticed for the first time that Woyzak, who had covered twice as much ground as he had, had done his taping as if he were working for a contractor rushing to finish a crap job on a row of egg-carton houses. Ben Roehm was exacting, and to satisfy him you had to get your seams flat and smooth. Woyzak’s work looked as crude as his getaway car. In the tape were lumps and bulges and wrinkles that would stay there forever, visible even when the walls had been skimmed with plaster and covered with two coats of paint.

Woyzak saw Conor staring at his work. “Something wrong?”

“Just about all of it’s wrong, man. Did you ever work for Ben before?”

Woyzak put down his tools and stepped toward Conor. “You little red-haired fuck, you telling me I can’t do my work? You happen to notice I’m twice as good as you are? I think the only reason you’re still on this job is you went crazy over the old guy’s pictures. The Old Man wants to keep the civilians happy.”

The Old Man? Conor thought. Civilians? Are we back in base camp? “Hey, his kid took those pictures, man,” he said.

“A nigger named Cotton took the pictures.”

“Oh, shit.” Conor felt as if he had to sit down, fast.

“Cotton was in little Daisy’s platoon. The kid made some arrangement to get copies of his pictures—you asshole.”

“I knew Cotton,” Conor said. “I was with him when he bought it.”

“I don’t care who took the pictures—I don’t care if he’s alive or dead or somewhere in between. And I don’t care if everybody around here thinks you’re some kind of hero, because you’re just a fuckin’ nuisance in my eyes, man.” Woyzak took another step toward him, and Conor saw the overlapping fury and misery in him, laid down so deeply he could not tell them apart. “You hear me? I was in a firefight for twenty-one days, man, twenty-one days and twenty-one nights.”

“We gotta do something about the cat faces in the tape, that’s all—”

Woyzak wasn’t hearing him any more. His eyes looked amazingly like pinwheels.

“PUSSY!” he screamed.

“I thought you liked pussy,” Conor said.

“I’m a good taper!” Woyzak shouted.

Ben Roehm stopped everything by slamming his fist against a sheetrock panel. Coffeepot in her hand, Mrs. Daisy hovered behind the contractor.

Woyzak smiled weakly at her.

“That’s enough,” Roehm said.

“I can’t work with this asshole,” Woyzak said, literally throwing his hands up in the air.

“This guy was edging me on,” Conor protested.

“Charlie would have a fit if he heard bad language in the house,” Mrs. Daisy said nervously. “He might not look it, but he’s very old-fashioned.”

“Who’s the taper, anyhow?” Woyzak bent down and picked up his blade and brush. His eyes looked normal again. “I only want to do my job.”

“But look how he’s doing it, man!”

Ben Roehm turned a solemn face to Conor and told him they had to talk.

He led Conor down the hall to the demolished morning room. Behind his back, Conor heard Woyzak purr something insinuating to Mrs. Daisy, who giggled.

In the morning room, Ben stepped over the holes in the floor and slumped back against a bare wall. “That boy is my niece Ellen’s husband. He had a lot of bad experiences overseas, and I’m trying to help him out. You don’t have to tell me he tapes like a sailor on a three-day drunk—I’m doing what I can for him.” He looked at Conor, but could not meet his eyes for long. “I wish I could say something else, Red, but I can’t. You’re a good little worker.”

“I suppose I was on a picnic the whole time I was in Nam.” Conor shook his head and clamped his mouth shut.

“I’ll give you a couple extra days’ pay. There’ll be another job, come this summer.”

Summer was a long time coming, but Conor said, “Don’t worry about me, I got something else lined up. I’m gonna take a trip.”

Roehm awkwardly waved him away. “Stay out of the bars.”

2

When Conor got back to Water Street in South Norwalk, he realized that he could remember nothing that had happened since he had left Ben Roehm. It was as though he had fallen asleep when he mounted the Harley and awakened when he switched it off in front of his apartment building. He felt tired, empty, depressed. Conor didn’t know how he had avoided an accident, driving all the way home in a trance. He didn’t know why he was still alive.

He checked his mailbox out of habit. Among the usual junk mail addressed to “Resident” and appeals from Connecticut politicians was a long, white, hand-addressed envelope bearing a New York postmark.

Conor took his mail upstairs, threw the junk into the wastebasket, and took a beer out of his refrigerator. When he looked into the mirror over the kitchen sink, he saw lines in his forehead and pouches under his eyes. He looked sick—middle-aged and sick. Conor turned on the television, dropped his coat on his only chair, and flopped onto the bed. He tore open the white envelope, having delayed this action as long as possible. Then he peered into the envelope. It contained a long blue rectangle of paper. Conor pulled the check from the envelope and examined it. After a moment of confusion and disbelief, he reread the writing on the face of the check. It was made out for two thousand dollars, payable to Conor Linklater, and had been signed by Harold J. Beevers. Conor picked the envelope up off his chest, looked inside it again, and found a note: All systems go! I’ll be in touch about the flight. Regards, Harry (Beans!)

3

After Conor had gazed at the check for a long, long time, he replaced both it and the note in the envelope and tried to figure out somewhere safe to put it. If he put the envelope on the chair he might sit on it, and if he put it on the bed, he might bundle it up with the sheets when he went to the laundromat. He worried that if he put it on top of the TV he might get drunk and mistake it for garbage. Eventually Conor decided on the refrigerator. He got out of bed, bent to open the refrigerator door, and carefully placed the envelope on the empty shelf, directly beneath a six-pack of Molson’s Ale.

He splashed water on his face, flattened his hair across his skull with his brush, and changed into the black denim and corduroy clothing he had worn to Washington.

Conor walked to Donovan’s and drank four boilermakers before anyone else came in. He didn’t know if he was happier over getting the traveling money than miserable about losing his job, or more miserable about losing his job