Koko Read Online Free PDF Page A

drop of sweat squeezed
     itself out of Poole’s right eyebrow and trickled into the little depression between
     the bridge of his nose and the corner of his eye; one of the rusty-sounding insects
     blunderedinto his lips. When the NVA did not move on to any of the real corpses near him, Poole
     knew that he was going to die. His life was over, and he would never know his son,
     whose name was Robert. Like his love for this unknown son, the knowledge that the
     soldier was going to blow his head apart here on the narrow field full of dead men
     was total.
    The shot did not come. Another of the rusty insects fell onto his sweat-slick cheek
     like a spent bullet and took a maddening length of time scrabbling to its legs before
     it lumbered off.
    Then Poole heard a faint click and rustle, as of some object being pulled from a casing.
     The soldier’s feet moved as he shifted his weight. Poole realized that the man was
     kneeling beside him. An entirely uncurious hand, the size of a girl’s, pushed his
     head flat into the smeary earth, then yanked his right ear. His impersonation of a
     dead man had been too successful—the NVA wanted his ear as a trophy. Poole’s eyes
     snapped open by themselves, and before them, on the other side of a long grey knife
     where the sky should have been, hung the motionless black eyes of the other soldier.
     The North Vietnamese gasped. For a brimming half second the air filled with the stench
     of fish sauce.
    Poole jackknifed up off his bed and the NVA melted away. The telephone was ringing.
     The first thing he was fully conscious of was that his son was gone again.
    Gone too were the corpses and the lumbering insects. Poole groped for the phone. “Mike?”
     came tinnily from the receiver. He looked over his shoulder and saw bland pale wallpaper,
     a painting of a misty Chinese landscape over the bed. He found that he could breathe.
    “This is Michael Poole,” he said into the receiver.
    “Mikey! How are you? You sound a little weirded-out, man.” Poole finally recognized
     the voice of Conor Linklater, who had turned his head away from the telephone and
     was saying, “Hey, I got him! He’s in his room! I told you, man, Mike’s just gonna
     be in his room, remember?” Then Conor was speaking to him again. “Hey, didn’t you
     get our message, man?”
    Conversations with Conor Linklater, Michael was reminded, tended to be more scattered
     than conversations with most other people. “I guess not. What time did you get in?”
     He looked at his watch and saw that he had been asleep for half an hour.
    “We got here about
four-thirty
, man, and we called you right away, and at first they said you weren’t here and Tina
     made ’em look twice and then they said you
were
here, but nobody answered your phone. Okay. How come you didn’t answer our message?”
    “I went out to the Memorial,” Poole said. “I got back a little before five. I was
     in the middle of a nightmare when you woke me up.”
    Conor did not say good-bye and he did not hang up. Speaking more softly than before,
     he said, “Man, you sound like that nightmare really weirded you out.”
    A rough hand tugging his ear away from his head; the ground greasy with blood. Poole’s
     memory gave him the picture of a field where exhausted men carried corpses toward
     impatient helicopters in the hazy blue light of early morning. Some of the corpses
     had blood-black holes where they should have had ears. “I guess I went back to Dragon
     Valley,” Poole said, having just understood this.
    “Be cool,” Conor Linklater said. “We’re already out the door.” He hung up.
    Poole splashed water on his face in the bathroom, roughly used a towel, and examined
     himself in the mirror. In spite of his nap he looked pale and tired. Megavitamins
     encased in clear plastic lay on the counter beside his toothbrush, and he peeled one
     free and swallowed it.
    Before he went down the hall to the ice machine, he dialed the