Tiger's Tail

by Gus Lee

  “Nothin’ personal, but I think this kinda gives lawyers a bad name, or you think I'm just bein’ an asshole pessimist?”

  “You're a pessimist. How much time we got?”

  He cackled. It was good that I liked it, because he laughed at me a lot that day. “Nagol goes straight to Hell when he dies.”

  “He may be there. He choked on his own vomit last night.”

  He looked upward. He closed his eyes, his great mouth open. The great brows bunched in either agony or ecstasy. “Thank you, Lord. Two damn prayers answered on the same damn day.” He did a double take at me. “Nagol dead on his upchuck. Christ.” He giggled, again and again, higher and higher, crazy as a latrine rat. “You know, they get pissed, they do us with sump hoses from the shitters.”

  “I can see why you want to leave.”

  “No you can't. This place ain't hard. Stink don't kill.”

  “I'm not so sure.”

  His eyes narrowed as he studied me, a bluish tongue coming out to test the air for predators. McCrail's big, swollen eyeballs ran over me like a tongue over an old wound.

  “You got a debt on you.” He smiled, happy.

  Damn all old sergeants, weighing men's pains, sniffing out drinkers, wife beaters, barracks thieves, rapists, pot-heads, bed wetters and physical cowards at ten meters.

  I was inches away, making it easy for him to set the hook.

  “Sir, what'd you do?” The girl was dead and the rounds ripped her lungs and the women were dead and there was no changing any of it except that their deaths were growing larger with time. The girl would be about sixteen now. The grass cut my hand and I shot her and the baby, the memory loop out of order but visually clear. Wanting to protect Asian women, leaving one alive long enough to call me Ba. I was ill, my gorge rising. I put my head down, slowly hating him.

  “You got a load. Nam.” A goofy grin. “You were in some bad crap to get those medals. Lost some guys. Made a bad tac move and now dead boys play flag football in your sleep. Hey, no sweatee-da. Five, six years, you get used to most of it. All blind luck, anyway, who gets blowed away, who doesn't. You know that, lad.”

  Then he smiled, as if a bright halo were growing on his head.

  “Dammit—God sent you here! Seven damn years and I get the word, and here you are! You got a marker on you a mile wide and you owe big. You're the best damned soldier who ever crapped between two boots I ever seen! Cap'n, you go for me.”

  I fought my guts. A guy in this place, with his foul luck, believing in God? Go to Hong Kong? I didn't think so. “Why?”

  “Sir, just go. No college debate.” His eyes lit up. “I see it now. Thought He'd left me in a bad place but He was testing me. God sent you to me in the desert. Dammit! You believe me?”

  “I don't even understand you. This here is God's favor?”

  “Tee hee. God's here, lad. You learn that when you're without the regiment and its laws, the work, the boys. The noise in your head stops and it gets clear.” He looked up, like a lunatic.

  I wasn't buying it. His face dropped. “Okay, sir, you're a fine, cynical, college-boy sonofabitch, hooked to your dead. I'm asking you,” he snapped in his gruff, avalanching command voice, “to trust me. Look at my record. It'll tell you something. Ask why a good ole Regular Army lifer NCO like me would rip off something wasn't his and not kill people who by God's law oughta die hard.” His gray eyes burned with inner fires, unimpeded by past error and driven by a just future.

  I had known idiot generals and idiot lieutenants but not a single stupid sergeant major. Piercing screams; guards beat a prisoner above us. Dante was no poet; he was a reporter.

  “Cap'n, I'm real sorry for your tragic past. You lemme know if you're going to help or just look pretty.” He exhaled. “Gotta say now. LeBlanc knows you're here sure as monkeys shit from trees. You come and ask law-school questions and waltz out to stick your nose back in a law book? Sir, you crossed the line of departure into enemy country. We got hours before LeBlanc quotes scripture the wrong way and puts rat killer in my rice—or yours. You asshole officer. I got a mission. Do you?”

  My visit had put him in deeper jeopardy. Keep him and Levine alive. Find Jimmy. Follow the law. He had a good voice. The call to action. My job was getting Jimmy. “McCrail, I'm not going to break the law for you. I am not going to play with your illegal businesses. That's black-letter gospel.”

  He shook his big head. “You know, they're right? Talking to a lawyer is like passing a hair ball right through your dick.”

  “Well, I always lived for endorsements.”

  He looked away, shrouding his disappointment. “No problem.” He chewed on a big, chapped lower lip. “You're not for real, so what? You gotta see I don't give a good hoot and a holler about myself. Had a fine wife, good friends, and Nagol's dead as a French doornail.” His eyes were down and he was talking to himself. He lowered his head to pick his nose, forgetting I was there. Then he saw me and jerked.

  “I got a mission I ain't accomplished. Sticks in my craw every day here in paradise.” He leaned back, chains clinking.

  “What's your mission, Sergeant Major?”

  “Hong Kong,” he growled, an animal in a cage.

  I hit the concrete table with the flat of my hand, making the sound of a gun. “What do you have on LeBlanc!”

  He didn't blink. He shook his head. I heard moans and tin cups on steel bars. He looked down and tears ran down his cheeks. “I'm gettin’ old and fat and some weeks I don't eat and my heart hurts and I'm not done with my job. Am I talking to myself? You hear me, mister? Am I in the room with you, or am I freakin’ out in a funny farm?”

  “I'm here with you, Sergeant Major.”

  He bared yellowed teeth. “Chinks made me. Ain't no train thief.” He snorted. “Not good with books like you, West Point. But I worked at it. I did the train, clumsy, no touch, like shooting a commie fifty-one-caliber. That damn camera. Funny Koreans, working on Buddha's birthday. Pulling Freddy for my lawyer. Who'd a guessed?”

  I told him that LeBlanc had already buried him in his backyard. “As long as you hold on to the secret, LeBlanc has cause to kill you. Once it's out, killing you has no purpose.”

  He closed his eyes, his face wonderful in its strengths and terrible in its visible costs. He was going into his murky past, a tangled labyrinth of old roads and buckets of bad-smelling years. I saw his closed eyeballs pick out dimming trail signs.

  “Seven years, eight months, two weeks and two days ago, not that I'm countin', I was in ROK lockup. This JAGC—really, a beautiful-lookin’ man—comes in. God's smile. Sweet Mary, I thought he was an angel. Some men have that look.” He shook his immense head.

  “I told him everything—the recruitin’ plan, the black-market gizmo—laid out the whole nine yards like he was my priest.

  “‘Thank you, brother,’ he says. ‘Be all you can be,’ he says. He says, ‘You know what it is that you can be?’

  “I said, ‘No, sir.’ I looked at him, a kid at his daddy. I had a problem; he was gonna fix it, put on the Band-Aid.

  “He says, ‘You're a damned thief and a filthy disgrace to your uniform. You have broken so many laws for what you pretend to be a noble purpose. It's all your selfishness, and arrogance, and your eternal soul will burn like fat in unholy hell.’ His words.

  “You know how it is. ROKs woulda treated me square, but they saw an American light colonel treating me like dog crap. So here I am, hounded like a bullshit life-term drug dealer.”

  “Wizard's a full colonel now. And that's what Curadess was—a life-term drug dealer. You're doing his time.”

  McCrail grunted, moving like an athletic combat sergeant. “What the hell does that mean? What does 4cura-dess’ mean?”

  I told him he was serving Cabra Curadess's jacket. His face filled with surprise and then he laughed high. “Thought it was a new Korean cuss word! Hell, I had no idea it was my name! Who the hell was Curadess?” I told him.

  He flashed his big, square t
eeth. “Captain, you nail the Wizard's skinny butt to the floor an’ rip his head off so the devil can crap down his neck!” He was experiencing pleasure. I let it rush through him, let old nerves tingle with the once familiar.

  “Here I am in solitary gook lockup and it's the flamin’ Wizard who's deservin’ a final verdict—without an appeal.” Giggle. “Laddie, will ya go to Hong Kong for me?” Pure brogue.

  “You do fraud and tell the wrong JAGC and end up here. Now you got a JAGC you can trust and you won't say squat. I'd say you're a stubborn sonofabitch.” I was swearing, a bad sign.

  “Aye, lad, I see your fires. Smell the smoke a your work against the enemy. Aren't ya thinkin', laddie, it takes one to know one? You're holdin’ onta somethin'. With both hands, tight.”

  “Nice try. We're sweating your problems, not mine.”

  His bright gray eyes gleamed over dull teeth. “Think hard on Hong Kong, lad. And be thinking too on this man who'll kill us, once he hears we shared a tot in this kind, cozy green tavern, talkin’ of Fahey, McConnaughay, and McLaughlin.”

  He grimaced. “No man ever bested me. He came damn close. But now I got ‘im. The filthy, stinkin’, connivin’ sonofabitch! I'm gonna drop a verdict on his wee piggy head.”

  He winked, Uncle Patrick to little Nephew Jackson. “With a pinch a your help. You're me lawyer. An angel with the Uniform Code in your ammo pouch, death in your beautiful black eyes, able ta give the Wizard a dose a his own rotten medicines.

  “He screwed me good, sir. Made me live with roaches again. Fouled me pa's name, the flag, the lads, my stripes, and every unit I served. He did my family and he puts the slam on God Himself.” He bared his yellowed teeth.

  “Goddammit! He's not to do it again!” It was an order.

  18

  A CRY TO HEAVEN

  The joss was burning down and the foxhole clock said it was time to move out. TIG existed to correct wrongs, but Carlos Murray hadn't sent me to break the law.

  Axiom: Lawyers can only represent a client's interests; they cannot become involved in a client's business. But no JAGC had ever done to a client what LeBlanc had done to McCrail. I was the JAGC-in-the-box, looking at the results of justice gone to hell.

  Under American law, all parties were theoretically equal, making Jimmy no more valuable than McCrail. But small men struggled to find legal aid while corporations hauled in the best attorneys like BaBa used to net fish. Whites who killed whites got stir, and blacks who killed whites got the chair. That's why it was a theory.

  I had done 7 July 1967 and had nothing more to lose. Soldiers serve, and I was looking at a man who had been sodomized by jurisprudence. I saw my job. I could also smell it. Whatever drove McCrail was not petty profits. He had a cause.

  “What do you want?” I said quietly.

  His face collapsed on itself. Tears leaked from tightly shut eyes. Later, he opened them. With a grunt, he hauled on his chains, crushing himself, his hand out.

  “Shake my hand,” he said, strangled, voice comically high.

  It was like shaking hands with Ohio. Never get involved in the personal affairs of clients. He wasn't even supposed to be my client. Shake hands with yeh, karma.

  His needs had overwhelmed my education and training and my clean chance to get Jimmy. Tears ran down his craggy face. I had seen men and boys cry for dead comrades and lost causes. He wept Achilles’ tears for Patroclus, the salts older than most soldiers in a youthful army, shed by a man who was no proponent of weeping.

  I used tissues to swab his face. “They were just hot-rod kids in the Bronx.” The porridge voice. “Then the draft calls. Korea.” The summer of 1950. ” First of the Twenty-fourth. Good regiment. You went to West Point. You know what that means.”

  He had been in Mac Arthur's march to the Yalu in a bitter Manchu winter. Peking had said: Go back or we will fight you. MacArthur had laughed, split Eighth Army from X Corps so they couldn't support each other, and walked them north into the worst defeat in Army history, losing ground we would never see again.

  “Friday, 24 November 1950. The Chongchon River. Too cold to dig foxholes.” His eyes begged. “You'd like it, sir; we dug good in high ground. You could smell fires or bird breath. Full moon. The wind cut to the bone. MacArthur in Japan, he kinda forgot to send winter gear. Sniffed something. My hair stood up. I unsafetied. So did the squad.” Nothing.

  The cold was deadly. The scent was wet wool.

  He had yawned and the Chinese had come out of the snow. They overran the regiment with bayonets and burp guns, blowing whistles as guys Mac Arthur's staff called “Chinaman laundrymen” cut off the companies. Five of his rifle squad survived because they had dug in and faced front, firing at the first wave. They survived to become POWs and were marched into Manchurian winter with their injuries.

  Shot, blown up and bayoneted on the night of the full moon, McCrail carried his buddies to the camp. Half-dead, they reached Tangyuan Public Enemy Prison, north of the Songhua, where the Reds tortured Chinese Nationalist and ROK officers.

  “This,” waving his head at Naktong, “is seventh heaven, garden spot of Asia, Copacabana. In Manchuria, they beat our dicks to sign confessions. Killed most of the Oriental POWs.”

  Three years later, in the summer of 1953, the Pan-munjom cease-fire was signed and prisoner exchanges began. Only McCrail and a Canadian were strong enough. McCrail's buddies would come in the September exchange.

  McCrail left his pals in the huts of Tangyuan. Walter Twigs, Joseph Two-Toes, Cal Siguera, Seb Delasanto, without a diploma among them, and the old Chinese Nationalist General Fu Tse-hsu.

  “Sir, I promised I'd get them out.” He sighed and looked around. Naktong seemed deserted. “Come September, commies said my boys died. But no white boxes. I said: They're alive.”

  McCrail asked futilely for help from the War and State departments, the White House and the UN. They grew to hate him.

  He wiggled his nose at me. “Cap'n, maybe you can scratch my nose with your pen. Yeah, like that. Then I found out.” His boys had signed confessions to the Reds.

  He glared. “Don't give a crap how tough you are. Your Red brothers up in Manchu land are hard boys. They break people. Do your dick, ears, teeth.” He spat. “My boys said we did hot-dog germ warfare for a Howard Johnson's in Peking. Bogus.” He grimaced. “And the War Department gave ‘em up for ‘confessing.’ It was Joe McCarthy time. They hosed POW patriots.”

  He put his head down and talked to himself, rapidly. Then McCrail had gone to Vietnam twice, to be shot four times at Chu Pong massif. He survived a two-hour dustoff and rehabbed in Formosa.

  There, a black-dress lady visited him. She was the daughter of General Fu Tse-hsu, his Tangyuan mate. She informed him that her father had died and that the four Yanks were still alive. She had read about McCrail's POW efforts. She said that governments can't help—she used Chinese gangsters.

  She used the San Ho Hui—the old Triads. She mentioned the White Lotus, the Black Flags—syndicates, smugglers, Chinese gangs. Sergeants major were the sons of systems, but America had abandoned his men. He gave the Black Flags twenty grand in crisp, newly printed U.S. currency drawn from sixteen American Legion posts with GI survivors of the 24 November Chinese offensive along the overstretched American lines.

  “Black Flags said our boys were in Manchuria. No proof, no photos, for twenty grand. Others dropped out.” Head shake. “Left me and a buncha chinks, last kind of goddammed people I ever wanted to see. For half a million U.S., they'd get four POWs to Hong Kong. Half a million. Half a goddamn million! I'd have to be an oil tycoon.”

  “So you did recruiter fraud. And became a black-marketeer.”

  “Oh, hell no, sir. I'm it. The black-marketeer—Mr. Max. My show. Hell, I shouldn't say that. God gave it to me, He did. See, South Koreans'd join our army in a heartbeat. Families pool money and buy a fake ID to get the youngest son in. He comes out a U.S. citizen and ships in the family. Instant Americans—add hot water and stir.” He shrugge
d. “Korean kids are educated. Enough English to answer the ASVAB.” Military entrance exam. “They work like hell in the Army, put our boys to shame. Good workers. Family men.”

  I shook my head. “That's a lot of cheating and rule breaking.”

  “Yeah, West Point. Well, excuse me. I got buddies in Dutch.”

  Enlistees had to be U.S. citizens or holders of alien resident green cards. McCrail made bogus green cards and sold them to his Korean enlistees at five thousand a copy. Supply clerks get minimum security checks, so he enlisted them as Seventy-six Yankees, company supply clerks. He only took clean applicants. Seventy-six Yankees, MOS 76Y. It rang a bell. He was talking fast.

  After basic, they returned to Korea, buying immense quantities of controlled American products with McCrail's capital and selling them on the black market for five to ten times the purchase prices.

  “They scraped off the top, gave me a quarter-mil a year clear. Had warehouses in Taegu, Tongducheon, Kwangju.”

  He had beaten the Yongsan GE225 computer, which should have rung the alarm. “Got me a cyclic program, Fortran V. Made Yongsan read my boys’ purchases as a binary zero. No hits, no arrests. Got my half-mil in two years, shut it down, and gave the earnings to the Flags.”

  “But it wasn't enough,”

  “You got that right. ‘So sorry, Mr. Max’—they can't say ‘McCrail’—‘your boy not in Manchuria. They in Russia.’ Russia! Crap, that made me pucker! My men, toys for the fucking Russkies.” His eyes distant, the chains slack.

  He peered at me. “They wanted ammo—old seventy-five-mike-mike Willy Peter, white phos, moldy ordnance. Ain't made anymore. Chinks swore a family oath in a Confucius temple it was goin’ to Iraq and Iran. Bet on a war out there, dollars to donuts. Now guess who has depots full of that crap.”

  “ROK Army,” I said. “In container cars.”

  “Four-oh, time on target.”

  “So you wired the program to load the Willy Peter on a munitions train and rerouted it and the Black Flags took it.”