Tiger's Tail

by Gus Lee

  “She say Buddha give her—old dry-bone-lady— orphan kids. Buddha also give her this twelve man. She say, Chang go down mountain, he crazy man, givee away yang power.

  “Here, Jungsan, she give him life. Kids need father. Jungsan Korean boys need Chang. She askee his help.” Catalina paused. “But, man, he stone cold dude.”

  Chang donned his military flap cap, covering his bald head and looking less menacing. He paced, his face compressed with argument, conflict, confusion. Yes, I thought, think it out. Jae-woo waited for my look, smiling bravely against all my fears. My presence endangered her, and I felt an exhaustion that went beyond the body. I struggled to remain a player on the mountain. Part of me wanted to leave everything, Jungsan and the bomb, to close my eyes and take McCrail down the mountain to the med. My innards were sour.

  Chang studied me, looking for the lie.

  “Nuke stay?”

  A chance for resolution. I imagined what would happen to negotiations if these Inmingun knew the bomb was a hundred meters away. “We're taking them out. I do not know if they will stay out. We have recom-mended it.”

  Catalina started to translate. “Kwenchanayo, is okay,” said Chang. “I understand.” He turned and asked the mudang a question.

  “He askee to hide here,” said Catalina. “Old lady, she say no. Aeigu! She say his men be monks.” Catalina shuddered, rubbing her arms as if feeling the cold for the first time. “She say he workee for kids. Teachee Kong-ja manners.”

  Silently, I urged him: Take the current. Ride it out.

  Chang looked at me. He looked at Catalina Oh and spat. He would take no cards, the decision scrawled across his hard face, rejecting holy offerings because they came with American manners and Western fishnet stockings.

  “Wait,” I said. “What if, at first, you only took care of Korean orphans?” Catalina translated.

  Chang's eyes narrowed. He spoke. “How long?”

  A teacup fell and shattered. One of the older attending women screamed and children moaned in terror, their vocalized fear stopping my heart.

  The Wizard was on the porch with Song Sae and Levine. They were roped to him. He entered the garden.

  42

  A DAY IN THE SUN

  Song Sae was soiled and worn, the shining vitality of her dramatic features blunted by exhaustion and fear. Levine seethed, her left cheek bleeding from a deep cut. They had come through the house and he was armed.

  LeBlanc was the aristocrat standing on his veranda, waiting for mint juleps, flanked by his unhappy women. No one else knew he was here.

  He wore a GI winter white parka. He held a cheesy CAR-15 in his right hand, the muzzle on the mudang and two extra banana clips taped to the one locked into the rifle. The selector switch was at full automatic, safety off. Ninety rounds of 5.56mm ammo that would tumble after entry, ripping organs.

  A.45 service automatic was in his left, the hammer back and the muzzle at Levine's throat. Song Sae's black wool overcoat, purple dress and black boots were drenched and spattered with mud and ice.

  Two rappelling ropes ran from their abraded necks to the Wizard's cartridge belt. Song Sae was fighting deep fatigue and fear; Levine was looking for an opportunity, glancing at me. I wondered if he had found McCrail and the bomb. I closed my eyes. God, we're in deep shit.

  He dragged the women. He seemed agitated. “Captain Kan, you are under arrest for consorting with the enemy and the devil itself.” The beguiling voice. “For all your exposure to Christianity, to West Point, to find you plea-bargaining with filthy Reds and offending the Christ…”

  I saw Colonel LeBlanc through BaBa's eyes. “I think you're taking the Lord's name in vain.”

  The Wizard recoiled. Song Sae and Levine slipped away from LeBlanc and his handgun. Slowly, panting, shaking, her gnarled fingers refusing to cooperate, Song Sae tried to loosen the tight noose about her neck. Levine also loosened hers.

  The Wizard's emotions surged nakedly through his features. It had been a long night. He blinked, struggled for words. “You—you—stupid, uppity tree monkey! You Red loverl Quote scripture to me! God, Fm not surprised… truly…. America faded from perfection when they let in people like you.”

  “They didn't let me in,” said Levine. “I was born here.”

  “I'M NOT TALKING ABOUT YOU!” he cried, spittle flying, the guns shaking, making children stir and moan in fear, the elder women crying again.

  The Wizard stepped backwards, his distant infantry skills gone, pulling Levine and not noticing that Song Sae had freed herself. He tripped on a stone marker at the edge, lost his balance and recovered. LeBlanc kicked the marker in anger. Mud fell from him onto its Hangul and English characters.

  MRS. KIM PAEK MCCRAIL 1934–1966

  He sighed. “Darkies running the Army, women wearing brass, giving orders! IGs running with whores. My God!”

  “Yo, Freddy paksu” said Catalina flatly. “Long time no see, hey? No like do handy-cuff kinky sweet time no more?”

  He winced and turned to me, talking fast. “Whores and darkies multiplying faster than whites, taking our power, attacking our race. Now, even West Point's gone to hell!” He blinked, looking at the snow-covered ginkgos, then at Purvis, sad that the only non-Asian male he could look at was a black man he had bashed in the head with a rifle stock.

  “Cadet Choir has niggers and chinks and spies, singing to God.” He laughed, low and almost happily. “That would be the day, right? God hearing niggers sing to get into Heaven.” He snickered.

  “Sir, I've always wanted to know,” said Purvis, “if you're a true sociopath, or if you're just deliberately con-fusing us with multiple pathological options.”

  “Gotta be drugs,” said Levine.

  I edged closer.

  “Trying to provoke me, you bitch?” He shook his head in anger, the mouth bitter and dejected, eyes unfocused. I was getting closer. “None of you see it, do you? Why I came here, into Asia?” Wet, red, fatigued eyes, seeing the end of dreams.

  “America's gone to the niggers, to the servants. Now they go to West Point.” A glance at Purvis. “They go to medical school and learn how to become lords while the Reds get stronger.” He looked at him with contempt. “Well, God brought me here to do something about this.”

  “Not drugs,” whispered Purvis.

  It was the Southside problem all over again. Except for the atomic bomb in the garden, we were without Levine's grenade or weapons. Levine was ready to pull the rope and I was edging to where I could do something.

  LeBlanc saw Levine, instantly yanking the rope with all his weight, dropping her to the ground. He put the muzzle on me and slipped her rope from his D ring. He backed up, chest heaving.

  “Captain Levine, join your coloreds. Go.” He pointed with the muzzle. Slowly, she joined us, the slack rope following, making snake tracks in the wet, thinning snow.

  “Now I want the witch doctor. Come here right now, chogi mos tic” he said to the wang mansin.

  Song Sae spoke to the mudang, who backed up slowly, the wind of the precipice billowing the flowing silk sleeves of her ceremonial dress.

  They were his passports through the Bando. “Madam witch doctor, don't be stupid. God, you come right now, or I kill you.”

  Song Sae spoke to the mudang, her voice quivering. She said, “Non-gae.”

  The mudang glided to the cliffs edge, the back of her dress whipping her hair. She took a sailor's wide stance.

  “Please,” she said pitifully to the Wizard. “No hurt mudang:’ The dismay in her voice caused the girls to burst into tears.

  Anger filled the Wizard's face. Hatefully, he looked at the girls. My heart ached as he saw Jae-woo, who was tearing wildly at her arm. He wanted her dead.

  “You old bitch,” he muttered tiredly at the wu. He faced Levine, admiring her looks and disliking her ethnicity.

  “You. Get those ugly half-breed bastards out of here. Keep the little breeding bitches here.” Chang quietly sighed.

  “And t
he Commies stand fast,” added LeBlanc. Levine asked the boys to move into the house. They froze. The wang mansin repeated the order, and they moved, their eyes flitting between the mudang, the Wizard and Levine.

  LeBlanc backed up as I inched forward. He aimed at me.

  “Edge closer, I'll blow away the breeders. Now back up. All the way.” He pointed the assault rifle at the girls. We backed up.

  Song Sae stood with the mudang on the cliffs edge. The afternoon wind rippled across her partially opened overcoat and purple dress and rustled the branches, blowing a fine mist of pure white snow across the pallid gray sky.

  “I didn't tell you to untie,” said LeBlanc, his eyes on me.

  “I am sorry,” whispered Song Sae. “The rope hurt my neck.”

  LeBlanc gauged distances. The persuasiveness in his eyes was gone, replaced by the cold mechanics of murder one. The man who had gone to great lengths not to kill McCrail or Jimmy Buford was, today, going to take the bomb and slay everyone.

  He had cleared his soul of its remaining conscience.

  LeBlanc kept his eyes on me and went to the cliff, the distance making him safe from me.

  He looked at the two women, both pretending to ignore him, their knees flexed, their breathing ragged. He laughed at them, the guns on us. I could take him down. I wanted to take him down. I remembered my seventh winter, full of bitter winds. The junk had canted and I had slid overboard near a Red Gorge whirlpool. I swallowed water, struggled and felt the slimy river fiends take me, soothing me. I came to on the deck, vomiting out the demons, BaBa, dripping wet, shivering, pushing on my back while the rain fell. In Vietnam, for a moment, I had welcomed eternity.

  Now I felt the same soothing. Death was not so formidable.

  He pointed the rifle at the girls. “I said back up. I mean way back. To those trees.” We backed up, my heart dropping.

  “Let's see, Chinaman. You were an engineer at West Point, even if you look like the slanty kitchen help. Listen up, Cadet.”

  Humor him. “Yes, sir.”

  “I have a smoothed sear. My cyclic rate of fire is twelve hundred rounds a minute, but the thirty rounds in the first magazine'11 be out in a fraction over one tick. Two seconds to reload. You're thirty meters from me. With a dead start, it'll take you four ticks. I'll have killed all of you twice by then.” He would enjoy watching fish die, flopping on the deck.

  “Now for the witch doctors. I weigh one ninety. What do you think the little one weighs—eighty pounds wet? The whore, she's one ten.” He laughed again. “And I know they're coming.

  “They want to copy that old Korean kisaeng harlot, Non-gae, heroine of Korea. All she did was jump a little Jap general and roll him down a hill.

  “Well, now. I'm a little larger than that, aren't I?”

  His face contorted. “Come here, both of you. Now,”

  No body block: he was expecting it. To make sure, it'd take a bear hug off the cliff. To die with him. The wind blew in the low shrubs as the women inched toward him. It was not their job. It was mine.

  The Wizard thought of something, grinning with the inspiration of new torture. “You idiots know we have atomic bombs in Korea?” He nodded to himself, fortified. “Gentlemen, I got one of them! Funny, isn't it, how everyone trusts a lawyer. I mocked a bomb copy and switched them. Now it's good to go—into the north. Look behind me, people. You can see the mushroom cloud from here. Tonight, it's over for P'yongyang and beloved leader Kim II Sung. The shit's in the fan.”

  Did McCrail get the real one, or a mock? I was sure it was real. I silently edged forward.

  “You're stupid for a chink, aren't you? Simon says take two big steps back.”

  I took two small steps back, flexing leg muscles, tightening them with the need to release. Under a rush, he would move to the left, away from the precipice. I aimed for that, gathering breath, needing to explode at him out of the blocks. I felt Chang prepare, both of us counting on the Wizard's shooting us before he killed the women and the girls. Don't think of the great, distant jia or Cara. Do your job.

  A breath of ground noise and a hand seized my ankle and held on. Slowly I looked down.

  Patrick McCrail. Bleeding and wheezing in the bush, on all fours, a trembling swamp creature, sprouting twigs, sludge and snow. He said something, very softly.

  It was a wind in soft spring's false grass, bugs scraping tropical leaves, eyelashes fluttering on a silent night.

  “Say again,” I said through my teeth.

  “Remember your promise, lad. And put flowers on her grave.”

  “Let go,” I said through my teeth. “I got a plan.”

  He almost giggled. “Me too, lad.” A wheeze. “Light a cigar for me.” He seized my tunic and yanked me. I went down as he pulled himself up and dropped me in the bushes. With a great expulsion of air, McCrail shot out of the low shrubs and sprinted head-down for the Wizard, sobbing and bending to his left. I jumped up in a flurry of snow and sprinted after him, following his canted, twisted torso, a gargantuan, charging Quasimodo, his left side in paralysis, the air whooshing in and out of failing lungs, moving by sheer will, rushing like a wounded, galloping rhino at the hunter of his species, the great shoulders and arms driving him, Chang, Levine, and I only steps behind. I was closing and running out of real estate.

  LeBlanc froze at the sight of McCrail's craggy face and his huge, fast rush. I roared a tiger's hunting cry at the Wizard and he jerked and the explosive, staccato gunfire echoed, the lead plucking at my jacket and singing past my head. Girls screamed as he sprayed and bullets ripped and tore into the sergeant major's massive, barreling hulk, the big body recoiling from the blows, left, right, staggering, his breath whimpering. The Wizard backed up.

  McCrail's great body silently smothered the rifle, a cloud taking a hill, his burly arms engulfing the Wizard, his thick legs driving, his dress shoes kicking divots as he catapulted both of them over the edge of the cliff.

  I stopped at the edge.

  Below us, the bodies were a single projectile, McCrail's shirttails flapping like small, ineffectual wings. LeBlanc screamed, a hand clutching at air.

  They shrank to dots and made a small, tight impact on snow, limbs askew near a winter oak. The snow and rocks beneath me slipped.

  Song Sae seized the mudang and pulled her back. Shakily, they knelt at the edge, sobbing. Girls and women wailed the lyrics of my nightmares. Snow sprinkled from me down the cliff. Catalina joined us, panting. She spat at the memory of the Wizard.

  I looked over the edge, disbelieving McCrail's mortality. He was too large to die. I was too good a runner to have allowed him to get to the Wizard before me. I stared, my mind in cold riot. Please, let this be a dream.

  The cliff beneath gave way.

  “Aigu!” cried Chang, grabbing my arm and my tunic, buttons and ribbons popping into space as the edge collapsed down the cliff toward the dead. He struggled to pull me back to solid ground, and two of his men grabbed me and hauled.

  Children were crying and running. They ran for the house, for escape, for adults. Levine and Catalina began collecting kids. My only client in Korea was dead. I heard the weeping of children.

  The girl, dark hair flowing like a black banner, ran for me, her arms out, crying, and I picked her up and held her. She was breathing and unbleeding, her tears the proof of life.

  “O bay” she cried, her face in my neck, her thin arms clutching me in desperate, unanswered and unspoken needs.

  I hadn't killed her; she lived.

  It's okay, I said. You're good and strong and God loves you. I was speaking Vietnamese, and the young bamboo shoots were soft under my boots, the humidity of copper muds in my lungs, the steam rising from the dead.

  I walked her away from the cliff, her arms small and vital.

  I looked at her. It was not the girl. It was Jae-woo, the adolescent in a field jacket. She did the hugging for both of us. I blinked at the nature of us, the fine natural wonder of a man holding a frightened child. I marvele
d that of all the humans I had held, this one seemed the noblest, the most graceful.

  I let her see me smile with great jen, benevolence, and her small, tear-flooded face illuminated as she pressed her forehead against mine, sniffing and shuddering as she clutched me again, holding not only me but her idea of me, a girl's dream of a mythical loving father, constantly safe, forever caring, eternally approving, never angry or too busy or drunk. Her body calmed my broken heart.

  I held her tight, my arms not mine but the warm, embracing limbs of all Eastern families, all great jia, welcoming home a lost daughter whose own warm, breathing presence worked like a sweet antidote on my aging ills.

  The sun broke from behind clouds, casting long, lan-guorous beams of brilliant light onto the white valley.

  “O ba, o bay” a girl said in my deaf ear, making me feel all my injuries, physical and psychic.

  “Kwenchanayo, it's okay. You're fine,” I said. “You're safe. All is well. Nothing to fear.”

  43

  TO LAUGH WHENEVER YOU CAN

  Noon, Sunday

  Silently, the white-parka Ninety-five Mike team set a perimeter around Jungsan. A thin Henry Jubala and an immense RTO, radio-telephone operator, with a point man's Winchester 870 pump, sat next to me near the sharp boulder.

  “Now,” said Jubala, “did I, or did I not, know you were up to some bad shit?”

  He looked around him, Uzi at the ready. “I take Pluto and the damned Inmingun'11 come outa the ground. Assholes already did us.”

  Jubala and Magrip should've opened on Broadway together, doing light comedy and slapstick.

  Jubala checked the packs with wiry hands, his blue snake-head tattoo flexing jaws and tongue, his eyes still bug-eyed.

  “Tell me this is the genuine nuke,” I said. “Technically, that's a negative. Just a puny garden-variety atomic, a baby ‘shroom. Fission device. Not fission-fusion-fission, your true duck-tailed all-American nuke. This here's a little plutonium SADM Niner-Ought-Niner. A hundred-meter fireball to make Mother Nature move some rocks. Six thousand rems, 120,000 calories per square centimeter of thermal rad blast, five-PSI over-pressure with hundred-and-twenty-mile-per-hour winds, blow us to hell.” He enjoyed talking about his Pluto. I imagined he had few chances.