Festival for Three Thousand Women

by Richard Wiley

  They were near the Pusan-chip, which didn’t serve beer, but Bobby got the idea that these guys might like to try some makkoli. The missile base, surely, was no more than a two-hour drive.

  “My hometown bar is right here,” he said. “Come on. Let’s get drunk.”

  Gary and Ron went around and hopped up into the back of the truck, and while he waited, Bobby turned to look at the Goma, whom he could feel standing near him. It wasn’t the Goma, though, but the crazy woman, and she held out her hand, calmly advancing toward him.

  “Give me some money or I’ll bite you,” she said. Was this what she had been saying all along? She curled her lips back and advanced strategically, but though she garbled her words just as she always had, they were suddenly clear. No reason for any trouble, just pay up. Bobby reached into his pocket and found a rumpled note, and when he held it up she closed her mouth, surprised.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t understand before.”

  Ron and Gary jumped down from the truck then, so the woman took the note quickly and moved aside. They had gone into the truck to change their clothes and were wearing jeans and sweaters now beneath their regulation army coats.

  Bobby had never known the Pusan-chip to be very crowded, but tonight it was full. The back room held a group of six, and there were only three stools left out front. He looked at Ron and Gary to see how the place suited them, but they seemed fine, so he pulled the stools around and they all sat down. The Goma had come in too and was huddled over by the door.

  “Ah, teacher,” said the owner. “Welcome.” The other customers had grown quiet, but because of the owner’s friendliness they soon started talking again. Miss Kim was sitting with the group in the back room, and she looked at Bobby and waved. The owner, in the meantime, had brought a pot of makkoli and was staring at the soldiers.

  “This is the best makkoli available,” she said. She then waited until Bobby had translated for his friends.

  Bobby was sitting between the two others, and he quickly raised his bowl, draining it all. Ron and Gary hadn’t touched their drinks yet, so he flicked the residue from his bowl and offered it to Ron, Korean-style.

  “This is what they do here,” he said. “Now you’ve got to drink everything.”

  Ron did what Bobby told him, and then he and Bobby both ganged up on Gary Smith. They hadn’t been there five minutes when the owner brought another pot.

  The Pusan-chip was full of farmers and day laborers from the railroad, men who had been laying another spur out from town, working along in front of a steam locomotive. The laborers were sitting closeby and the farmers were in the back room. After some discussion the laborers bought the Americans a pot of makkoli, and when the owner brought it over, all the laborers bowed. The farmers leaned out to see what was going on.

  “Thanks,” said Bobby. “Great. Thank you very much.”

  He and Ron and Gary bowed to the laborers, and in a minute Bobby had the owner send a pot back to them, and one to the farmers as well. The farmers then sent a pot out to the Americans and, for good measure and because they’d come late to the thing, they sent a pot to the laborers, who were happy to have come out ahead. And in order to confuse things even more, one of the farmers got down and carried a full makkoli pot around the room, filling everyone’s bowl.

  “This is great,” said Gary. “In the Vil people are always suspicious. There are never any guys like these hanging around.”

  Bobby swept his arm around the room. “This is a great village and these are all great men,” he said.

  Ron and Gary quickly agreed, and suddenly Ron grabbed Bobby’s arm. “They are great men,” he said. “Tell them so, would you? Stand up right now and tell them that they’re all great men.”

  Ron seemed so taken with the thought that Bobby stood and attempted to get everyone’s attention by rapping his knuckle against the edge of his bowl.

  “Hey,” said one of the laborers. “Hey, look at that.”

  “My friends and I want you to know that we think Taechon is a great village,” Bobby said. “And we think its people are great too.” He wanted to say that the people in the village were what made it great, but he didn’t know how.

  The farmers and laborers sat there staring.

  “What else?” Bobby asked, looking at Gary and Ron.

  “Tell them we think Korea is better than Vietnam,” Gary said, and Ron chimed in, “Tell them the whole evening is on us. All the drinking.”

  But Bobby had paused too long and the others, believing that he was finished, began to applaud. And after that one member from each group stood to answer his praise with drunken praise of his own. Both men stood at the same instant and then each tried to relinquish the floor.

  Finally the farmer stood alone, weaving back and forth, his toes hooked over the edge of the upper-room floor. “This is really something,” he said. “In all our years coming here to drink we’ve never had such an experience as this.” He looked back at his contingency and they all nodded. “Always before we have seen Americans in trucks,” he said, “but you are real people, not in trucks.” For a moment the farmer stopped like Bobby had, utterly taken with the thought that they were all real people, and when the laborer edged up off his stool again, the farmer saw him and sat back down quickly, giving up the floor.

  “I’m only a laborer,” said the man, “and don’t know as much as a farmer, but I want to tell you something that I remember. When I was a young man, an American soldier saved my life. I was running from the North Koreans and the American soldier picked me up on his motorcycle, letting me ride to safety on the back of it, my arms wrapped around his middle. His name was Daryl Prescott and I only wondered if any of you know him, where he might be today.”

  His pronunciation of the name Daryl Prescott was so clear, so well practiced, that Ron and Gary both heard it coming from an otherwise indivisible wave of sound.

  “Who the hell is Daryl Prescott?” asked Gary, and the laborer said, “Right, have you seen him? Do you know where he might be today?”

  The evening got a little hard to remember after that. The owner was drawn into the drinking, and soon Miss Kim came down to sit upon Bobby’s knee, ordered to do so by one of the farmers. The farmers and the laborers had mixed their groups, and the laborer who knew Daryl Prescott tried sitting with the three Americans for a while, but since they had nothing to say about Daryl, he soon moved his stool away again.

  And for the rest of the night they drank and drank. Ron wanted Bobby to help him flirt with Miss Kim, but Bobby instead used everything to his own advantage. Ron saw it and began looking down. “God, I wish I spoke Korean,” he said over and over again. Then Bobby told Miss Kim that Ron was in love with her and she changed laps for a while, exchanging little glances with Ron and making him smile.

  Bobby had been talking to Gary a few minutes when Gary said, “I’ve been down to her village twice.” It took Bobby a moment to realize that he was talking about Cherry. Were his feelings so obvious, then? Had Gary, after all, seen the desperation in his run?

  “Who’s she going to Japan with?” Bobby asked. “Is it another woman? I know them all.”

  Gary shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said, and suddenly it was clear to Bobby that Gary hadn’t intuited anything, but was only looking for someone on whom to unburden himself. He was interested in Cherry too!

  Bobby turned a frowning face in Gary’s direction. “Since she’s not here, why talk about her?” he said, and the drink was spinning so wildly in his head that he had to close his mouth to keep more words from coming out.

  Luckily the Goma got into some trouble then, closing the door on the subject of Cherry Consiliak. The Goma had been sitting in the doorway, and one of the laborers had kicked at him when trying to go outside. It wasn’t much, but the Goma howled so loudly that the owner told him he’d have to leave.

  “Maybe it’s time for us to go too,” said Gary, touching Ron’s sleeve. “It’s late.”

  “Oh Chr
ist,” said Ron. He and Miss Kim had been quiet for a long time now, but were still sitting together.

  “Really,” said Gary. “Look, it’s eleven thirty.”

  Bobby didn’t think it could be, but Gary’s watch said so. Curfew was in half an hour. Bobby knew, however, that the army was exempt from it.

  “Everybody’s going home soon,” he said.

  Ron sighed and dislodged Miss Kim, who stood up easily, soberer than anybody else. “Righto,” said Ron.

  Miss Kim went back to the farmers, but by then everyone was up, getting ready to go. The owner gave Bobby another chit to sign, more to be added to his steadily growing tab, and suddenly they were all out the door together, into the absolutely freezing night. “Good-bye! Good-bye!”

  When they got to the truck everyone was so drunk that nothing mattered. Ron managed to unlock the door and start the engine in what appeared to be a single motion, and once Gary was on board the truck lurched away. There was no time for last-minute comments. The truck was the drunk now and everybody moved to stay out of its way.

  God it’s cold, Bobby thought, looking up at the high moon and stars. It was so cold that a man could die, lying down in the street like Bobby wanted to do. At least he had his coat. The Goma was in shirtsleeves, wearing almost nothing by his side. “Go home,” Bobby told him. “Hurry.”

  Bobby walked past the Pusan-chip again to catch the opposite road to Policeman Kim’s house, and when he looked back he saw the Goma coming his way.

  “No!” he shouted. Then he reached down and found a rock to throw, missing the Goma by a mile but making him run.

  When Bobby was halfway home the curfew whistle blew, chilling him to the bone. And though he tried his best, he could not stop staggering. There was nobody else on the road, no sign of the laborers or farmers, and when he passed the police station it too seemed dead. Only when he got to the far edge of the village, did he see a tiny light on in the tearoom. “Ah ha,” he mumbled. He staggered that way, weaving like crazy but laying a quiet knock on the door.

  “Who is it?” said Miss Moon.

  “It’s me, late and drunk.”

  Bobby didn’t think she would let him in, but she opened the door readily, letting him pass into the tearoom’s warmth, its stove still hot, its music still lightly playing.

  “My,” said Miss Moon. “You’re a mess.”

  Bobby smiled, and when he took her in his arms she didn’t seem startled and didn’t move away.

  She let Bobby kiss her cheek and hold her for a moment before turning him back toward the door. “Sometime perhaps,” she said. “But not tonight.”

  Once outside again Bobby got home in no time without falling or disgracing himself further on the lonely road. No one was up when he entered the house, and there was no sound, not even that of the grandmother’s cough. In his room he climbed under his blankets and turned his radio on, letting the static sing to him, letting it buzz around the room as he passed out, the soles of both feet planted firmly on the floor.

  The Arousing

  Nine in the beginning means: Shock comes—Oh, Oh!

  Bobby awoke at dawn, as the hostile winter-morning light settled about the corners of his room. His first thought was: if I move I will die. He was breathing and his eyes were slits to see through, but the room looked dead and he got the feeling that he’d been transported out of the world into a hospital ward in hell, where there were beds but no medications, diseases but no cures for them at all.

  He was still, in a way, wearing his clothes. That is, his overcoat was on, but his pants were down around his knees. He could see his shoes pointing up at the bottom of his blanket, like the feet of some long, cloven beast, and at the sight of them he uttered a silent cry. No one wore shoes in the house. What if he’d marked the floor, what if there were mud smudges leading to his door?

  Ah, but if Bobby had had only the telltale smudges of muddy shoes to live with how good life would have been. He turned then, only a little, to test his ability to do so, and he came face to face with a monster. Lying there on the floor beside him, a foot from his head, was a sculpture of something awful, the evidence no lawyer would take into court. Was it the brains of a cow slain in some midnight satanic ritual? Was it a part of his own stomach, dislodged from his body in a fit of alcoholic wretching? No, it was simply this: a pile of excrement half the size of his head, laid there by himself when he’d dropped his pants sometime during the night.

  Think of it—he had shit in his room. Bobby lay eye to eye with it for a moment and then opened his nose, testing, to see if its smell permeated the whole of Policeman Kim’s house. He was a disgrace, a bum, the lowest example of what a good-intentioned man could become, and he pictured the newspaper headlines in his hometown: “BOBBY COMSTOCK SHITS IN ROOM, DISCHARGED FROM PEACE CORPS.” Oh, it was awful! But for some reason, perhaps because he was made of the same stuff, he couldn’t smell it.

  Bobby got up quietly and looked around for a tool of some kind, something he could use as a shovel. There was nothing much. There were books, but what writer’s work could he put to such use? There was his Peace Corps trunk with his clothing in it and on top of the trunk were the letters he had gotten. Finally he spotted a stack of clean Korean aerograms, the ones he intended to use to answer the letters he had received.

  Bobby took the stack of aerograms and, picking up a ruler that lay beside them, approached his disgraceful mound. He sat down and pushed as much excrement onto each aerogram as he thought it would hold. For a moment he considered sealing the aerograms, but abandoned the idea. Of the dozen aerograms, he used ten of them to carry his awful message of disrespect away. He had to make two trips to the outhouse, five aerograms piled high in his hands each trip, and then he threw the ruler down into the pit after them for good measure.

  On his way back to the house Bobby removed his T-shirt and soaked it in a bucket of freezing water. The morning was as cold as the night before had been, and when he returned to his room to scrub the spot away, he was shivering uncontrollably. He managed to wipe the T-shirt several times across the floor, and then he threw it out the window and crawled back into bed just a second before the grandmother pushed his door open and came in to see what was going on.

  “Aigo,” she said. “You’ve been farting. I could smell it all the way to my room.”

  Bobby tried to answer but could only shiver. He’d placed a woven basket on the spot where the shit had been and had scooted his bedding closer to it to discourage anyone from standing just there.

  The grandmother peered at him closely. “Are you merely hung over,” she asked, “or are you really ill?”

  Again, though he tried to answer, to say that it was just the wine, when he opened his mouth his teeth banged together like knives on a chopping block.

  “Phew!” she said. “I better call the doctor. Something else is wrong here.” She got another two quilts and laid them over him gently, and then she went out the door. It was still barely six in the morning, and it was Sunday so Bobby knew she’d be back alone. Who could she find now, at this hour of the day?

  But in truth he did feel worse than he had ever felt before, and he was beginning to believe that it was more than just the wine and his shame. His bowels started to grumble, and he felt the need to get up and go back to the outhouse, but he was shivering so violently that he could not easily move. And soon a sharp pain came across the lowest part of his abdomen, like screws winding remorselessly in.

  “Ohhh,” Bobby moaned, and the boy who was bad in English stuck his head through the door. Why could he never remember this boy’s name?

  “Outhouse go?” he asked.

  “Please,” said Bobby. “If you could give me a hand.”

  The boy came cheerfully into the room, somehow getting Bobby to his feet quite easily, wrapping his overcoat around him before lugging him out the door. He was a strong boy for one so small, but Bobby’s feet were moving too, though he felt an ache all along his legs when he put his weight on
them. How in the world had he found the strength to carry the aerograms out the way he had?

  When they got to the outhouse the boy left Bobby alone, walking a short distance away. Inside the dismal shack Bobby looked down through the thin floorboards at the various triangles of blue there on that hard brown sea. He was shaking so much that he had trouble bending his knees, and once he was squatted there, hands against the walls, he was sure his weight would break the boards and that he would tumble down there himself, to die among his ten messages.

  As he emptied his bowels and covered the evidence, however, the vise in Bobby’s belly loosened and he was able to stand and open the door, walking back to his room alone.

  Bobby wanted nothing but the warmth of his blankets and the quiet of an entire day to sleep, but when he entered his room again the grandmother was there. She was alone, but she had a shawl full of medicines and herbs, and when Bobby passed her, dropping his overcoat and climbing back into bed, she knelt down at his side.

  “Open your mouth,” she said. Bobby’s shivering had continued full force, though, and he could only open it and close it intermittently, like a dying fish.

  The grandmother unfolded her bundle and removed from it a silver cutting knife and the still bloody antler of a reindeer. Seeing the stub of the deer’s horn made Bobby sicker and he said, “No, I’m not taking that. It is against the Peace Corps rules. I can only take American medicine.”

  He spoke emphatically, but the grandmother continued scraping the bloody end of the antler and mixing what she got there with the powders she’d taken from another canister. When she had the medicine ready she looked at Bobby and he summoned all his energy to shout: “No! Go on now! Get out of here!”

  He used a guttural form of language and his rudeness had connected this time. The grandmother looked appalled and immediately packed everything up and hurried from the room. Bobby really was sick, for with the old lady gone he fell away from all his troubles in an instant and dreamed of being a child at play, at his own grandmother’s house.