Koko

“I don’t know yet.” He stood up. His body felt very tired, his mind not at all. He came down from the platform and went toward her.

“Nothing’s that bad,” she said.

“I was just thinking about a guy named M.O. Dengler.”

“The one who died in Bangkok.”

When he reached her he took one of her hands and opened it, like a leaf, on his own hand. Seen like this, her hand looked normal, not at all knobby. Lots of tiny wrinkles criss-crossed her palm. Maggie’s fingers were small, slim as cigarettes, slightly curled.

“Bangkok would be a filthy place to die,” she said. “I loathe Bangkok.”

“I didn’t know you’d ever been there.” He turned her hand over. Her palm was almost pink, but the back of her hand was the same golden color as the rest of her. Maybe the joints of her hand were slightly larger than one would expect. Maybe the bones of her wrist protruded.

“You don’t know much about me,” Maggie said.

They both knew he was going to tell her what had been stolen from his desk, and that this conversation was only a period in which Pumo could digest the fact of its loss.

“Have you ever been to Australia?”

“Lots of times.” She gave him a look of mock disgust disguised as no expression at all. “I suppose you went there on R&R and spent seven days seeking sexual release in an alcoholic blur.”

“Sure,” Pumo said. “I was under orders.”

“Can we turn off the lights and go back to sleep?”

Pumo astonished himself by yawning. He reached up and pulled the cord, putting them in darkness.

She led him back down the narrow corridor and into the bedroom. Pumo groped his way to his side of the bed and climbed in. He felt more than saw Maggie roll onto her side and prop herself up on one elbow. “Tell me about M.O. Dengler,” she said.

He hesitated, and then a sentence appeared fully-formed in his mind, and when he spoke it, other sentences followed, as if they were appearing of their own will. “We were in a kind of swampy field. It was about six o’clock in the afternoon, and we’d been out since maybe five that morning. Everybody was pissed off, because we had wasted the whole day, and we were hungry, and we could tell the new lieutenant had no idea what he was doing. He had just come in two days before, and he was trying to impress us with how sharp he was. This was Beevers.”

“Could have fooled me,” said Maggie.

“What he did was take us off into the wilderness on an all-day wild goose chase. What the old lieutenant would have done, what was supposed to happen, was that we got set down in the LZ, poked around for a while to see if we could find anybody to shoot at, then we’d go back to the LZ for lift out. If you got some action, you call in an air strike or you call in artillery or you shoot it out, whatever’s right. You respond. That’s all we were there for —we were just there to respond. They sent us out there to get shot at so that we could shoot back and kill a lot of folks. That was it. It was pretty simple, when you come right down to it.

“But this new guy, Beans Beevers, acted like … You knew you were in trouble. Because in order to respond, you have to know what’s out there that you are responding to. And this new guy who was fresh out of ROTC at some fancy college acts like he’s in an old movie or something. Inside his head, he’s already a hero. He’s gonna capture Ho Chi Minh, he’s gonna wipe out a whole enemy division, there’s a Medal of Honor already minted with his name on the certificate. He’s got that look.”

“When do we get to M.O. Dengler?” Maggie asked softly.

Pumo laughed. “Right now, I guess. The point is, our new lieutenant took us way out of our area without knowing it. He got so excited he misread his map, and so Poole kept sending the wrong coordinates back to base. We even lost our F.D., which nobody does. We’re supposed to be getting back to the LZ, and nothing around us looks familiar. Poole says, ‘Lieutenant, I’ve been looking at my map, and I think we must be in Dragon Valley.’ Beevers tells him he’s absolutely wrong, and to keep his mouth shut if he wants to stay out of trouble. ‘Watch out, you might get sent to Vietnam,’ Underhill says, which really begins to piss off the lieutenant.

“So instead of confessing that he was wrong and making some kind of joke about it and getting the hell out, which would have saved everything, he makes the mistake of thinking about it. And unfortunately there’s a lot to think about. An entire company had been shot to pieces in Dragon Valley the week before, and the Tin Man was supposed to be cooking up some combined action. Beevers decides that since we’re supposed to provoke action and respond to it, and since we had providentially found ourselves in what might be the perfect place for action, we ought to provoke a little of it. We’ll advance into the Valley a little, he says, and Poole asks if he can figure out our real coordinates and radio them in. Radio silence, Beevers says, and shuts him up. Poole is supposed to be chicken-hearted, get it?

“Beevers is thinking that we might spot a few Viet Cong, or maybe a small NVA detachment, which is what’s supposed to be down there, and if we’re lucky shoot the crap out of them and get a respectable body count, and go back with our new lieutenant blooded. Well, by the time we got back he was blooded, all right. He signals us to continue moving into the Valley, see, and everybody but him knows this is totally crazy. A creep named Spitalny asks how long we were gonna keep this up, and Beevers yells back, ‘As long as it takes! This isn’t boy scout camp!’ Dengler says to me, ‘I love this new lieutenant,’ and I see he’s grinning like a boy with a big piece of pie. Dengler has never seen anything like this new lieutenant before. He and Underhill are cracking up.

“Finally we get to this thing like a swampy field. It’s just getting dark. The air’s full of bugs. The joke, if it is a joke, is over. Everybody’s beat. On the far side of the field is a stand of trees that looks like the beginning of jungle. There are a few bare dead logs in the middle of the field, and some big shell holes full of water.

“I got a funny feeling the minute I laid eyes on the field. It looked like death. That’s the best I can say. It looked like a goddamned graveyard. It had that fixin’-to-die smell—maybe you know what I mean. I bet if you go to the pound and get into that room where they kill the dogs nobody wants, you’d get that same smell. Then I saw a helmet liner lying out next to a shell crater. A little way off from it I saw the busted-off stock of an M-16.

“ ‘Suppose we explore this piece of real estate and see what’s on the other side before we go back to camp,’ Beevers said. ‘Looks good, doesn’t it?’

“ ‘Lieutenant,’ Poole said, ‘I think this field is probably mined.’ He saw what I did, see?

“ ‘Do you?’ Beevers asked. ‘Then why don’t you go out there first, Poole? You just volunteered to be our point man.’

“Fortunately, Poole and I weren’t the only ones who had seen the helmet liner and the stock. They wouldn’t let Poole go out there by himself, and they weren’t about to try it for themselves either.

“ ‘You think this field is mined?’ Beevers asked.”

“You men think this field is mined?” screamed Lieutenant Beevers. “You actually think I’ll fall for that one? This is a struggle for command, and like it or not, I’m in command here.”

Grinning, Dengler turned to Puma and whispered, “Don’t you love the way his mind works?”

“Dengler whispered something to me, and Beevers blew up. ‘Okay,’ he yelled at Dengler, ‘if you think this area is mined, prove it to me. Throw something out there and hit a mine. If nothing blows up, we all go into the field.’ ‘Whatever you say,’ Dengler said—”

“As the lieutenant wishes,” Dengler said, and looked around him in the gloom. “Throw the lieutenant,” Victor Spitalny muttered. Dengler saw a good-sized rock buried in the muck near him, pushed it free with his boot, bent down, put his arms around it, and lifted it.

“—and he picked up a rock about the size of his head. Beevers was getting madder by the second. He told Dengler to heave the goddamned thing out into the field, and Poole came up next to Dengler to take half the weight. They did a one-two-three and heaved the thing maybe twenty yards. Everybody but the lieutenant fell down and covered his face. I heard the rock land with a thud. Nothing. I think we all expected a pressure mine to send shrapnel off in all directions. When nothing happened, we picked ourselves up. Beevers was standing there smirking. ‘Well, girls,’ he said. ‘Satisfied now? Need more proof?’ And then he did an amazing thing—he took off his helmet and kissed it. ‘Follow this, it has more balls than you do,’ he said, and he cocked his arm back and tossed his helmet as far as he could out into the field. We all watched it sail up. By the time it started to descend, we could