by Gus Lee
“Uuuoh,” said BaBa, looking at my Q, his teeth bared, Ma squeezing his big arm. “So very bad, Jackson. What Master Wong say to you? So bad messy! Hey, you have broom?”
I put away the Wizard's photo and read the memo.
In 1964, Frederick C. LeBlanc was relieved for meddling with client finances. He was sent punitively to the Second Infantry, Camp Casey, DMZ, his military career effectively ended.
But at Camp Casey he earned max evals, extended and was twice promoted. He has been Staff Judge Advocate on the Demilitarized Zone for four years and in-country nine. DMZ troops serve twelve-month hardship tours, so there is no institutional history on him.
Major General Michael Peters became CG at Casey two weeks ago and can be expected to know little about his top lawyer. But CPT Richard Johnson, Military Police, just returned from Casey. Now with TIG, he described a moral reign of terror in the police establishment and a cosa nostra-likt atmosphere in the JAGC office. He said there was one straight senior MP, a Major L. Foss, and that the Provost Marshal has been in Casey for eight years and is as suspect as LeBlanc. His suspicions sent CPT Buford to Korea.
The map showed Camp Casey adjoining Tong-ducheon, a village on the DMZ and the North Korean border. To the south was Seoul, the capital, where I would land. Below it was Osan Air Base, where Jimmy had landed in a military bird and disappeared.
The memo reminded me that we had split Korea with the Soviets after World War II and then invited the Korean War when Secretary of State Dean Acheson announced we would not defend Korea against Communist aggression. The North Korean People's Army, the Inmingun, promptly invaded the south through the Valley of War, fighting for reunification.
Joseph Stalin was going to commit the Soviet Army against us in Korea, but he died. Had the Red Army engaged us, President Eisenhower would have nuked the Russians, giving us World War III in 1953.
Korea is the most dangerous place in the world, where global thermonuclear war could erupt between four nuclear powers. An accident there could light the planet.
A beautiful woman looked out expectantly from the Korea Travel Bureau brochure. “We love you to visit us. We pay attention to you. Please visit Korea, Land of Morning Calm.”
It was the Land of Morning Calm to which I flew for Jimmy Buford. My orders were cut. I had aspirins, a text on nightmares, several Forms 15–74 to cite the guilty, good pens, a notepad, my knife, a sidearm, a Korean dictionary, a bag of cigarettes and gum to encourage interviewees, warm clothes and high hopes. Ma's modestly smelly, dried kwei-yu, good-luck-long-journey fish, was in my briefcase.
I wore a crisp military haircut, my class ring in my pocket, pretending to be a civilian. I would try to persuade Colonel LeBlanc that I had arrived in Casey to investigate racial problems, and not him.
Normally, IG brass on the collar brought latitude instead of a kidnapping. I finished the tomato juice.
I would enter LeBlanc's law office and his private quarters and use my Asian face to best advantage. I would restore Jimmy to his clan and convict the guilty.
What crimes were worth the kidnapping of Carlos's top IG? The cost to Beth and the boys could not be measured. I feared it was costing me the love of my life. Cara.
Even now, I couldn't recall the moments of our first meeting with my customary clarity. The bright afternoon in which we met and the first evening of our love did not fall into niches to be retained in the manner of my training. There were no evidentiary signposts, military log or historical chronology, no courtroom logic, only moments forever held, a sensation of never-changing lights. A lawyer's nightmare, a poet's dream, an entry into another world. Standing there, I had already fallen for her.
Knowing green eyes; bright words in a soft and husky voice; her disturbing, stupor-creating contours; a hint of vulnerability amidst a sea of admiring men; the quick and elevating humor. I disregarded the low coin of her popularity, the chasms in our backgrounds, the warnings of her blatant sexuality. I forgot my own expanding, insidious problems; I saw only her face.
Her eyes as she accepted my invitation to dance. The artistry of a lovely face, her laughter merging with the distant tinkling of champagne glasses, the murmur of an unimportant world. Her allure, her voice, full of lightness and hope, tinged with wounds well worn, a persona otherwise unchanged in so many ways since an earlier day.
We danced, the soft jazz flowing from her rather than the band. Accustomed to control, I kept a distance; mirthful, she moved closer. The pleasure of her face surpassed the warmth of her body and the invitation of our fit. The small channel between nose and sculpted upper lip had been fluted by Michelangelo; her soul was palpable, coming out of her bones, her allure mesmerizing, but elusive of recollection.
“You feel good,” she said. “And smell good.” A slow, lazy smile. “Can you talk?”
I shook my head. “I am no longer of the earth. I have the feeling that this day is mine. I haven't felt that way for a long time.” I tried to smile, and nothing showed. She studied me.
“So you don't use pick-up lines. And you're very attentive.” She licked her lips. “I like how you look at me.”
The aircraft bounced in turbulent winds as it crossed into tomorrow. Calm seas, BaBa said, do not make good sailors.
BaBa would turn the tiller toward Kiangsu Province. He would say: Hu-chin, find your grandfather's grave and find the mud graves of your younger brothers. Put them in fine thousand-silver-piece guan ts'ai, red iron-wood caskets, face-up. Get very smooth wood. Say the Jesus prayer for them. Hu-chin, thank you.
Grandfather and my brothers had been buried in haste along the riverbank, without good wood or paper money, in the middle of a bad-luck war.
On the western horizon, beyond the great, endless ribbon of pallid clouds, was Asia, beckoning, patient, ancient and ominous with old debt.
4
A WARMER SEA
Tuesday, January 15
Thick, imperfectly straightened auburn hair framing a rich, smooth complexion. She was not of the cool Pacific, sailing instead from a smaller, warmer sea that would smile on olives and palms and kindnesses toward children. Her eyes were magnets, free from grand error, witnesses to life's frolics, gently overseeing a fading scent of a secret and distant sadness. We were at a Stanford wedding in which she was known and I was at the outer margin. Her name was Cara Milano. She was an associate at Craig, Hofer & Tyler, a City firm that was giving women a chance. She earned three times my salary and drove a cream Alfa Romeo, a car I couldn't afford to insure. I could organize work, but not my life, and had no wheels.
I tried ignoring her. Then I asked her for a ride. We ended up at North Beach. The gods smiled and gave us a shadow of a parking space for Club Sport, where gaunt, unshaven Sicilians pitched curses and dishes like underpaid zookeepers.
“You could've left with any of fifty men.” A waiter jostled me, losing a tray. “Or all of them. Why me?”
Crockery crashed. Her hands steepled. “A herd of cute, moneyed Protestants. I know them. And there was you.”
“I know there's a compliment in there somewhere.”
“You have a darkness. It's almost beautiful. What is it?”
A rash of Sicilian curses. “My past. Then, I saw you.”
I brought up Watergate and avoided mention of Vietnam, Carlos Murray, Moms Bell and his radio, Doc and his fatal, clucking diagnoses, Curt Tiernan, Cyril Magnus or the fifteen plastic-wrapped riflemen I had lost, the Greek chorus of grieving mothers and widows and six bloody Asian women, my regimen of nightly epistles to the survivors. I didn't mention the Bufords, who had cared for me in my phantom days.
The withholding wasn't dishonest. It was ji hui— inauspicious talk—to speak to strangers and the innocent of bad times, of death and slaughter, of the secrets that expose the jia to criticism and risk.
She had loved, perhaps too much, and had known many somehow imperfect men. She loved knowledge. The television game show Jeopardy was a warm-up for a fertile mind that knew the architec
ture of Arnolfo di Cambio, the durable flora of the Kalahari, the wages of cholera vibrio, the contents of the Index Librorum Pro-hibitorum. Her curiosity was aroused, making her voice a caress. We were lawyers, each wanting the other to speak. Her eyes said: IF you want me, talk. I spoke, animated by the riches of China, driven by soulful desires, risking unfamiliar shoals, propelled by winds of unknown origin.
She listened as if I were a Shanghai storyteller with a drum, an empty stomach and ten voices. I described our thirty-foot, high-sterned, crimson-sailed, night-eye-painted ma-yang-tzu yan chu ‘an salt and tung oil junk, built by hunchbacked Hunanese and manned by lean, long-haired empty-stomach-men.
I told her of the emaciated k'u-li bitter-work-Wushan trackers who pulled our junk through Three Gorges.
Her eyes misted. “You know, I want law to be Christian, caring for the poor and weak. I prefer pro bonos to the big clients.” She practiced a profession she did love, and was a junk-puller in her heart. I learned she was loyal to a Basset named Noah, disliked silence, was pursued by most of the City's male heterosexual attorneys, and inspired in me a humor and a mirth I had not known since childhood.
I laughed as she weighed me on a complex scale for an undefined but highly sought job, threatening me with probes, urging me to be emotional, intriguing me with her attention.
Our talk was a soft fencing of backgrounds. I paraded my Chinese ways in food, family and traditions as warnings of difference, finding that they beckoned rather than deterred.
Another night, at Ondine's, she studied the fog. “It was a sweet childhood. Cannoli, sautagostino, pasta frolla, living for Columbus Day. Operatic shouting. Passion. Family everlasting. Then Papa left.” She shrugged, touched her lower lip. “It made me… professional. Tell me about your family.”
I was the firstborn, responsible for the clan line. I described the eccentrics, the comic and petty tragedies, omitting real ones like the deaths of my brothers, the demise of China and the woman who died on our deck.
I smiled with her quick laughter. She uplifted me, filled dark, humid holes with clean, sweet pleasure. The easy warmth of her eyes was an inoculation against my disease. There was pleasure in her ideals and in our shared days as she chipped away at me, teaching me about myself as I asked about her.
Ma stood in an ancient cardigan, next to the odorous fish, hair untouched, a run in both stockings, shouting silently about her only son spending time with a foreign woman.
Cara stood at the appropriate distance, bowing slightly. “Kan taitai, nin hau ma?” Mrs. Kan, how are you?
“Ah, ha,” said Ma, smiling in surprise, returning the greeting.
“Do you like her?” I asked later, meaning, Do you mind that she's not Chinese, and will have trouble cooking black-bean chow fun rice noodles and arguing endlessly about best stock, best dish, best bank, best girl to marry, and passing the same unopened bottles of Johnnie Walker around as notoriously insincere social gifts? And that eyeballs will be pulled by the low fan foreign women?
Fullface, Ma was salty and quick-tongued, worshiping all gods, laughing at her sons and chiding a good husband.
In profile, she was noble winter, cool ice on a hard river, remote, a modern Chinese woman hewn and shaped by continuous and unimaginable laments. She showed me her profile.
Chinese mothers own the bodies of their sons. My hurts were her wounds.
“Hu-ah, I happy you date anyone.” Ma loved Cindy Chew and had lost guan shi, face, with the Chews when I broke up with her from Vietnam. Ma knew Cindy was a casualty of war, a demon too big even for Ma to fix. War had undone China and a million jia.
“Even if she talks like foreign-country person.”
“Ma, she is a foreign-country person.”
Patting me. “Hu-ah, that what I say!” She often saw my feelings before I did. She sensed my guilt, misreading its cause. In the high pleasure of seeing Cara each day, I was not worried about my ultimately tolerant and loving parents; I was betraying a virulent loyalty to sadness I had brought home with me from Asia. It was the one thing Ma had hoped we had left behind us.
Cara insisted on seeing my Q. I had tried to clean it. It would have been easier to sing Puccini in Yiddish. “Enter and abandon all hope,” I said.
Her eyes opened wide. “It looks like you had a fire.”
“Almost. It needs a fire.”
A sigh. A change in the atmosphere, a fine French perfume in a moldy Q. A smile. “That's what this country needs. A return to naked lightbulbs.”
I scratched. Cholera, typhus, tetanus, tine test, Asian tariffs. At Tokyo's Narita Airport, beneath haunting flight announcements, I caught the Korean Air shuttle to Kimpo. The single-class cabin stared at me in unison. A disastrously thin American with an Infantry haircut and old Indochinese pallors, dressed in head-to-toe burgundy polyester, sat next to me. If a fire broke out, he'd melt.
He saw I was Army. Short hair, eyes that had seen worse than bad cabin food, a practiced bovine gaze. “Henry Jubala,” he said in a high, tired voice.
“Jackson Kan.” We shook. I recognized the name; he was the Army marathon champ, a narrow knot of gristle and guts. A blue, tattooed snake head with a questing tongue slid sinuously from his right cuff.
“Enda mid-tour leave,” he grumbled. “Back to Korea. Damn ROKs'll probably blow us away with friendly fire.” The light-triggered, security-conscious ROKs—not to mention the North Korean Reds—had fired at our inbound aircraft. “Crash, burn and die.”
“Well, Henry, that will probably ruin the whole flight.”
Over the horizon was Chinese Manchuria. My past, as we Chinese say, was in front of me. Jubala's gaze was terminally bug-eyed.
“War's gonna break on the DMZ. The dead'll draw maggots.”
I grinned. “You always this cheerful?”
“We're outgunned twenty-five to one. A million Inmingun led by thirteen-man Tiger Tails who'll slit our throats.”
“That would ruin my whole trip.” Inmingun, North Korean People's Army: fourth-largest, and angriest, army in the world. “What are Tiger Tails?”
His thin face scrunched. “Inmingun special-op raider teams. Sappers, snipers, spooks, terrorist night-crawlers. You know—Nam drained the crap outa us. Tiger Tails'11 hit us first. Then the Inmingun'll cross the border. We'll be maggot chow, cuz with the Nam, America ain't gonna fight no two-front Asian war. We'll dangle in the suck of a minus-seventy windchill factor. Shit, now, that make you happy?”
I gave him a stick of gum. Juicy Fruit, to sweeten him.
I imagined Cara worrying what had happened to me. Being told I had gone to Walter Reed Hospital without telling her. The remembered promise. The hurt. The anger. The other men.
“Might make someone happy. Know any more jokes?”
“Yeah. I'm going back to Casey.” He popped the gum and put the wrapper in his pocket.
In a world infested with decrepit posts, Casey was the clear, algae-green victor of the dog pool at the butt end of the American pipeline. It was a reminder that defiance of the massed Inmingun, and low-quality life in the modern age, were not outmoded concepts. Casey was proof to the ROKs that the Yankee Tiger—the symbol of America in Asia—would not ditch them as we were at that moment ditching South Vietnam.
The U.S. Army had exported the horrors of urban America to Korea, creating the Army's worst violent-crime indices in homicides, rapes, robberies and assaults. I had met defendants at Fort Ord, where I interned during law-school summers. I smiled brightly at my first client, a hard case up for manslaughter.
“Morning,” I said, my back stiff from the surgery that ended my Infantry career. “How are doing today?”
“Fuck you,” he said.
“You Infantry?” asked Jubala.
“I'm a JAGC. Tell me about Casey.”
He whistled. “Thought you were part of a Peregrine.” A Peregrine was an Asian-American hunt-kill team. “Seen characters like you at Casey. You're not one a them? Big sucker like you, a rear-area lawyer?”
“Paper's gotten heavier. What's your job?”
He didn't answer. “The SJA, the Wizard, he's a different duck.” He snorted. “Casey's a proctology test. Smells like crap.” He rubbed a long, crooked nose. ” Sits under Jungsan Peak, mouth of the Ouijeongbu Corridor. Old Valley of War.
“Valley's the invasion highway of the Bando, the peninsula. North Korea to Seoul.” He formed his fingers into a blade and thrust them forward. “Where the Inmingun crossed the border in 1950. Bastards are still up there, ten klicks from Casey. We sit like a damn tin can in front of a freight train.
“If the Inmingun come, we're top dead center in the kill zone. We'll all be red meat, dead kids stacked in alleys.”
The images went into focus with colors, my sense of purpose evaporating in the hot, ignited air. The girl. Help me, Ba. Oh, baby, I can't help you. A hundred crying or dead, ninety percent of the officers down. Men shot themselves or tossed chloroquine to contract genus Plasmodium, riding self-inflicted wounds and malarial fevers to avoid the rivers. Cyril's baby girl. The rounds went through him and the photo, turning it crimson, the picture weeping red tears. I put my head down, focusing on his snakehead tattoo. The tongue was fading to pink. Two flights to Asia. Two breakdowns.
“Hey, buddy, you're cool. Crap, man, didn't mean to trigger it. I'm such an asshole, talking it too much.” His voice dwindled. “Yeah, I miss ‘em, too. Not our fault we made it out. Goddamn, that was a shitty place.”
5
LAND OF MORNING CALM
I had gone to the Q to pack. Ma vigorously swept my room. Her gray hair was tangled and she still wore her cotton coat, evidence of preoccupation. The dust made me sneeze.
“Hu-ah, Fan taitai call me phone, say you go long trip.”