Koko

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.”

“All the time, or just at night?”

“Well, I can catch myself thinking weird shit at any time of the day or night, if that’s what you mean.”

Maggie swung her legs out from beneath her. “Okay, I’ll come down and stay with you for a while. As long as you remember that you aren’t the only one who can walk away.”

“How the hell could I forget that?”

And that was all it took. He did not even have to confess to her that right before he had come uptown, he’d been standing in his kitchen holding a bottle of beer and for a second had known that it was Ba Muy Ba and that the bullet with his name on it, the one that had missed him all those years ago, was still circling the world, homing in on him.

The General who was now a preacher stared at Tina just as if he was still a pissed-off general, and then barked a few words at Maggie in Chinese. Maggie answered with a phrase that sounded sullen and adolescent, and the General proved to Tina once and for all that he would never comprehend the Cantonese language by beaming at Maggie and taking her in his arms and kissing the top of her head. He even shook Tina’s hand and beamed at him too.

“I think he’s happy to get rid of you,” Tina said as they waited for the slow-moving, odorous elevator.

“He’s a Christian, he believes in love.”

He could not tell if she were being sardonic or literal. This was often the case with Maggie. The elevator clanked up to the General’s floor and opened its mouth. A sour stench of urine rolled out. He could not let Maggie see that he was afraid of the elevator. She was already inside, looking at him intently. Tina swallowed and stepped into the reeking mouth of the elevator.

The doors slammed behind him.

He managed to smile at Maggie. Getting inside was the hardest part.

“What did he say to you, just before we left?”

Maggie patted his hand. “He said you were a good old soldier, and I should take care of you and not get too mad at you.” She glinted up at him. “So I told him you were an asshole and I was going back with you only because my English was getting rusty.”

Downstairs, Maggie insisted on taking the subway, and demonstrated that she could still do an old trick of hers.

They had reached the top of the steps and were moving toward the token booth. The wind cut through his heavy coat and lifted the hood against the back of his head. When he looked around for Maggie and did not see her, the moment filled with a bright dazzle of panic.

A noisy knot of boys in black jackets and knit caps, one of them toting a huge radio, were punching the air and bopping along the platform in time to a Kurtis Blow song. Black women in heavy coats leaned against the railing and paid them no attention. Far ahead, a few men and women stared almost aimlessly down the tracks. Tina was suddenly, painfully aware of how high up in the air he was—suspended like a diver on a board. He wished that he was holding onto a railing—it was as if the wind could lift him off the platform and smack him down onto Broadway.

He had automatically fallen into line at the token booth. The boys had collected up at the head of the platform. Tina reached into his pocket, furious with Maggie for disappearing and furious with himself for caring.

Then he heard her giggle, and he snapped his head sideways to see her already past the turnstile and out on