Koko

They ordered drinks for two of the girls, and the others padded across the room. Onstage, the Ping-Pong balls were rotating in and out of sight with the speed of a revolving door.

The girl beside Poole whispered, “You hard yet? I make hard.”

Another strikingly pretty girl emerged through the curtain of streamers beside the stage. She was naked, and to Poole she looked no older than fifteen. The girl smiled at the men and women before her, then displayed a cigarette at the end of her fingers like a tiny baton, and lit it with a pink disposable lighter.

The girl bent backwards with a smooth acrobatic motion, thrusting her slender legs and pubis at the audience, and planted one hand on the floor. With the other she reached between her legs and inserted the cigarette into her vagina.

“This is getting deep,” Conor said.

The tip of the cigarette glowed, and half an inch of ash formed at the tip. The girl reached forward and removed the cigarette. A plume of smoke blew from her vagina. She repeated this performance several times. Poole’s girl began stroking the inside of his thigh and talking to him about growing up in the country.

“My momma poor,” she said. “My village poor-poor. Many many days, no eat. You take me back to America? I be your wife. Be good wife.”

“I already have a wife.”

“Okay, I be number-two wife. Number two be best wife.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” he said, looking at the girl’s dimpled face. He drank his beer and felt very tired and comradely.

“In Thailand, many men have number-two wife,” she said.

The teenager onstage blew a perfect smoke ring out of her vagina. “Pussy blow fractals!” the Australian yelled. “Record collectors are fun to go around with, cricketers swing big bats, but mathematicians are in their prime!”

“You have many television sets?” the girl asked Poole.

“Many.”

“You have washer-dryer?”

“Absolutely.”

“Gas or electric?”

Poole considered. “Gas.”

The girl pursed her lips. “You have two cars?”

“Of course.”

“You get extra car for me?”

“In America, everybody gets their own car. Even children get their own car.”

“You have children?”

“No.”

“I give children,” the whore said. “You nice man. Two children, three children, all you want. Give American names. Tommy. Sally.”

“Nice kids,” Poole said. “I miss them already.”

“We have best sex, your whole life long. Even sex with your wife get better.”

“I don’t have sex with my wife,” Poole said, amazing himself.

“Then we have twice as much sex, make up.”

“Pussy smoke cigarette, now pussy talk telephone,” the Australian said. “Pussy call University of Queensland, tell them I’ll be late.”

The nymph onstage sprang upright and bowed. All the girls, the Australian, and Poole applauded loudly. When she walked off, a tall, naked young woman came through the streamers with a big folder of paper and a handful of Magic Markers.

Poole finished his beer and watched the girl onstage plant two Magic Markers in her vagina and hunker over a large sheet of paper to draw a very creditable horse.

“Where do gay men go in Bangkok?” Poole asked. “We’re looking for a friend of ours.”

“Patpong three. Two streets up. Gayboys. You are not a gayboy?”

Poole shook his head.

“Come in back with me. I smoke you.” She threw her arms around his neck. Her skin had a delicious fragrance akin to the smell of apples, oiled leather, and cloves.

Poole and Conor left as the artist onstage was completing a landscape with mountains, a beach and palm trees, sailboats, and a sun with rays.

Just down the block from the Montparnasse were two dun-colored steps leading up to an open door and a sign reading PATPONG BOOKS. While Poole discovered the row of Underhill’s novels, Conor went off to look at magazines. Poole asked both the clerk on duty and the manager if they knew or had ever seen Tim Underhill, but neither man even knew his name. Poole bought the hardcover copy of The Divided Man he had carried up to the register to ask about, then he and Conor went out to have a beer at the Mississippi Queen.

“Hell, I signed one of those Koko cards myself,” Conor said at the bar.

“I did too,” Poole said. “When was yours?” He had never imagined that only one member of the platoon had cut off ears and written Koko on a regimental card, but Conor’s admission gave him a mixture of surprise and pleasure.

“The day after Ho Chi Minn’s birthday. We had to go out on some damn coordinated patrol with platoon two. Just like on Ho’s birthday. Except that this time the NVA mined the perimeter, and one of the tanks hit a fragmentation mine. Which slowed everything way, way down. Remember crawling out along the road, probing for the rest of the mines? Shoulder to shoulder? Anyhow, after that, Underhill surprised their point man out in the bushes, and we got the rest of ’em in a killing box.”

“Right,” Poole said. He could remember seeing the North Vietnamese soldiers moving like ghosts, like deer, along the road. They had not been boys. They were men in their thirties and forties, lifelong soldiers in a lifelong war. He had wanted very much to kill them.

“So when it was all over, I went back and did the point man.” A tiny girl in a black leather bra and black leather microskirt had taken the stool beside Conor, and was bending over the bar grinning at him to catch his attention. “I mean, I can remember cutting that dude’s ears off,” Conor said. “It was hard to do, man. An ear is all like gristle. You wind up only cutting off the top part, and it doesn’t look like an ear. It was like I wasn’t thinking, like I wasn’t even myself. I had to keep on sawing back and forth. And when I cut through it, his head slapped right down on the mud and I was holding this ear. Then I had to roll him over and do it all over again.”

The girl, who had listened carefully to this speech, pushed herself away from the bar and went across the big room to whisper to another bar girl.

“What did you do with the ear?” Poole asked.

“Threw it into the trees. I’m no pervert.”

“Right,” Poole agreed. “It would be pretty sick to save the ears.”

“Damn straight,” Conor said.

3

The telephone had gone from making a buzzing sound to total dead silence to a high-pitched whistle. Conor looked up from the pictures of naked girls in the magazine he had bought at Patpong Books.

“When did you do yours?” Conor said.

“My what?”

“Koko card.”

“About a month after the court-martials were announced. It was after a patrol in the A Shau Valley.”

“End of September,” Conor said. “I remember that one. I picked up the bodies.”

“Yes, you did.”

“In the tunnel—where the other big cache was. The rice cache.”

“That’s the one,” Poole said.

“Old Mikey,” Conor said. “You’re an animal, man.”