Читать книгу Koko - Peter Straub - Страница 20

‘We don’t have as many groupies as musicians,’ Harry Beevers said to Poole, ‘but they’re out there. They’re basically earth mothers with a kinky little yen for excitement. Is he getting heavy? Put him on your couch and come back down to the bar with us.’

‘I want to get to bed,’ Poole said. Conor Linklater, a hundred and sixty pounds of dead weight bequeathed to him by Tina Pumo, was draped over his shoulder.

Beevers breathed alcohol at Poole. ‘Nam groupies are complicated, but by now I’ve 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.