Koko. Peter Straub
got them figured out. They get off on, one, the idea of our being soldiers and fighting men but more spiritual somehow than other vets – two, they’ve got a little slug of social worker in them and they want to demonstrate that our country loves us after all – and three, they don’t know what we did over there and it turns them on.’ Beevers glittered at him. ‘This has got to be the place. They’d come thousands of miles in their sleep just to hang out at the bar.’
Poole had the uneasy feeling that, without knowing it, Harry Beevers was describing Pat Caldwell, his ex-wife.
After Michael had rolled Conor onto the side of the bed the maid had not turned down, he pulled off his friend’s black running shoes and undid his belt. Conor moaned; his pale, veined eyelids fluttered. With his cropped red hair and pale skin, Conor Linklater seemed to be about nineteen years old: without his scraggly beard and moustache, he looked very like his Vietnam self. Poole covered Linklater with a spare blanket from the closet; then he switched on the lamp on the other side of the bed and turned off the overhead light. If Conor was to have slept on a couch in Pumo’s room, Pumo must have taken a suite – Poole’s own room did not offer a couch for the comfort of sodden visitors. Undoubtedly Beevers had also taken a suite. (Harry had never considered turning over his own couch to Conor.)
It was a few minutes to twelve. Poole turned on the television and turned down the volume, then sat in the closest chair and removed his own shoes. He draped his jacket over the back of the other chair. Charles Bronson was standing on the grassy verge of a road in a dainty, empty landscape that looked like western Ireland, looking through binoculars at a grey Mercedes-Benz pulled up in the gravel forecourt of a Georgian mansion. For a moment anticipatory silence surrounded the Mercedes, and then a bulging wall of flame obliterated the car.
Michael picked up the telephone and set it on the table beside him. The maid had lined up the bottles, stacked clear plastic glasses, removed the empties, and wrapped the plate of cheese in cellophane. In the bucket, one bottle of beer stood neck-deep in water, surrounded by floating slivers of ice. Michael dipped the topmost glass into the bucket and scooped up ice and water. He took a sip.
Conor muttered ‘googol’ and rolled his face into his pillow.
On impulse Michael picked up the phone and dialed his wife’s private line at home. It was possible that Judy was lying awake in bed, reading something like The One-Minute Manager while successfully ignoring the television program she had turned on to keep her company.
Judy’s telephone rang once, then clicked as if someone had picked it up. Poole heard the mechanical hiss of tape, and knew that his wife had turned on her answering machine with its third-person message:
‘Judy is unable to answer the telephone at this time, but if you leave your name, number, and message after the beep, she will get back to you as soon as possible.’
He waited for the beep.
‘Judy, this is Michael. Are you home?’ Judy’s machine was attached to the telephone in her study, adjacent to the bedroom. If she were awake in her bed, she would hear his voice. Judy did not respond; the tape whirred. Into the waiting machine he uttered a few mechanical sentences, ending by saying, ‘I’ll be home late Sunday night. Bye-bye.’
In bed, Michael read a few pages of the Stephen King novel he had packed. Conor Linklater complained and snuffled on the other side of the bed. Nothing in the novel seemed more than slightly odder or more threatening than events in ordinary life. Improbability and violence overflowed from ordinary life, and Stephen King seemed to know that.
Before Michael could turn off his light, he was dripping with sweat, carrying his copy of The Dead Zone through an army base many times larger than Camp Crandall. All around the camp, twenty or thirty kilometers beyond the barbed-wire perimeter, stood hills once thickly covered by trees, now so perfectly bombed and burned and defoliated that only charred sticks protruded upwards from powdery brown earth. He walked past a row of empty tents and at last heard the silence of the camp – he was alone. The camp had been abandoned, and he had been left behind. A flagless flagpole stood before the company headquarters. He trudged past the deserted building into a stretch of empty land and smelled burning shit. Then he knew that this was no dream, he really was in Vietnam – the rest of his life was the dream. Poole never smelled things in his dreams. He didn’t think he even dreamed in color most of the time. Poole turned around and saw an old Vietnamese woman looking at him expressionlessly from beside an oil drum filled with burning kerosene-soaked excrement. Dense black smoke boiled up from the drum and smudged the sky. His despair was flat and unsurprising.
Wait a second, he thought, if this is reality it’s no later than 1969. He opened The Dead Zone to the page of published information. Deep in his chest, his heart deflated like a punctured balloon. The copyright date was 1965. He had never left Vietnam. Everything since had been only a nineteenyear-old’s wishful dream.
5 Beans Beevers at the Memorial
1
Poole awoke with a fading memory of smoke and noise, of artillery fire and uniformed men running in a cartoonish lockstep through a burning village. He pushed this vision into forgetfulness with unconscious expertise. His first real thought was that he would stop off at Walden Books in Westerholm and buy a book for a twelve-year-old patient named Stacy Talbot before visiting her in St Bartholomew’s Hospital. Then he remembered that he was in Washington. His second fully formed thought was to wonder if Tim Underhill was really still alive. He had a brief vision of himself standing in a neat graveyard in Singapore, looking down with both loss and relief at Underbill’s headstone.
Or was Underhill simmering in craziness, still back in the war?
Conor Linklater seemed to have vanished and left behind a crushed pillow and a wildly wrinkled counterpane. Poole crawled across the bed and peered over the far edge. Curled up into himself like a cabbage leaf, his mouth lax and his eyelids stretched unmoving across his eyes, Conor lay asleep on the floor.
Michael pushed himself back across the bed and went quietly into the bathroom to shower.
‘Jeez,’ Conor said when Michael came out of the bathroom. He was sitting in one of the chairs and holding his head in both hands. ‘What time is it, anyhow?’
‘About ten-thirty.’ Poole took underwear and socks from his bag and began dressing.
‘Blackout, man,’ Conor said. ‘Total hangover.’ He peeked out through his fingers at Poole. ‘How’d I end up here, anyhow?’
‘I sort of assisted you.’
‘Thanks, man,’ Linklater groaned. His head sank again into his hands. ‘I gotta turn over a new lease on life. I been partying too much lately, getting old, gotta slow down. Whoo.’ He straightened up and looked around the room as if he were lost. ‘Where’s my clothes?’
‘Pumo’s room,’ Michael said, buttoning his shirt.
‘Well, I don’t know. I left all my shit up there. I sure wish he’d come along with us, man, don’t you? Pumo the Puma. He oughta come along. Hey, Mikey, can I use your bathroom and your shower before I go back upstairs?’
‘Oh dear,’ Poole said. ‘I just got it all cleaned up for the maid.’
Conor left the couch and moved across the room in a fashion that Poole associated with recovering stroke victims in geriatric wards. When Conor got to the bathroom he leaned on the door-knob and coughed. His hair was standing up in little orange spikes. ‘Am I crazy, or did Beans say he’d loan me a couple thousand bucks?’
Poole nodded.
‘Do you think he meant it?’
Poole nodded again.
‘I’ll never figure that guy out, I guess,’ Conor said, and