by Martin Limon
Politely, I asked the young man in the back seat to move.
Groggily, he looked up at me and said, “Weikurei?” What’s the matter with you?
The bus had stopped now, behind a line of vehicles being inspected at the checkpoint.
I asked the young man again to move. He pouted and stared up at me as if I were mad. Ernie grabbed him my his jacket, tugged, and pulled him roughly to his feet. Other men sitting nearby stood and started to shout and wag their fingers at Ernie. Jill tried to mollify them but it wasn’t working. Koreans are usually unfailingly polite. But if they believe that one of their own is being mistreated by a foreigner, hostility can take the place of propriety. Quickly.
Ernie growled at the men, shouted back, and wagged his own finger.
I kneeled in front of the door. The long handle had been painted over with gray paint. I tried to move it but it wouldn’t budge. I needed more leverage. It had to be pulled up. I stood, grabbed the handle with both hands, and hoisted upwards with all my strength. ROK Army soldiers were at the front of the bus now, shouting instructions at the driver, motioning for him to pull closer to the side of the road.
You could bet that 2nd Division MPs were up ahead as the last line of defense.
My fingers were red and indented from pulling but so far the handle hadn’t budged. I took off my jacket, folded it, and slipped it beneath the door handle. This time I flexed my knees and took a better grip. Two-handed again. Using the strength of my thigh muscles along with my shoulders and my arms, I heaved with every ounce of strength I possessed. Jill knelt and examined the handle, seeing if there was anything she could do to help. There wasn’t.
Korean men were now shoving Ernie. As soon as he started shoving back the fists would begin to fly and we’d never get out of here.
I was about to give up, wondering if we could climb out a window, knowing that the ROK Army MPs would spot us if we did. I gave the handle one more pull, it moved this time, just slightly, groaned, and then popped upwards. I fell sideways onto two young women huddling next to the window.
Jill kicked the door open and, still clutching her AWOL bag, hopped out. I regained my balance, grabbed Ernie, and dragged him toward the back door. He was punched in the back a couple of times as I pulled him out onto the road. He tried to go back to finish the fight but I told him we had to get out of there. Finally, he followed.
Jill led the way down the waiting line of vehicles. Kimchee cabs mostly. A few three-wheeled trucks loaded with winter cabbage or mounds of fresh garlic. As we zigged and zagged between the vehicles, we heard a shout behind us. An American voice.
“Round eye,” he shouted. A Western woman. Up here, that could only be an American. Boots pounded on cement.
There was a small farming village just off the road. A few of the hooches were roofed with tile but most were thatched with straw. The three of us sprinted for the hooches. Off to the left were rice paddies. Above the hooches, on a hill, were terraced cabbage patches and, beyond that, woods. But between the road and the village was an open space of about twenty yards. As we sprinted across it I expected to hear the sound of rifle shots. But there were none. Only shouted commands for us to halt.
These MPs, unlike Bufford and Weatherwax, weren’t willing to shoot fellow Americans in the back just because they’d been ordered to take us into custody.
Lucky for us.
In the village, we dodged pigs and chickens and a couple of toddlers wearing only T-shirts, staring up at us with mucous-encrusted lips. Cute kids, but we didn’t have time to tickle them and watch them giggle. Jill and Ernie stayed right behind me, trusting me to guide them. At the rear of the village, I ran uphill, crossed a cabbage patch, and with a last burst of speed, plowed into the woods.
Breathing heavily, I held branches aside, making way for Jill and then Ernie, to take cover behind the tree line.
“Come on!” I said, continuing to climb uphill.
We blazed our way through the small forest until we reached the top of the hill which was covered by grave mounds. I crouched behind a row of tombstones and studied the village below. The MPs had stopped to inspect some of the hooches. They were attempting to interrogate the villagers—in English.
“Big nose, like me,” one of the MPs said, pointing at his nose. “Odi ka?” Where’d they go?
The village woman he was questioning stared at him blankly. We had been in and out of the village so fast that few, if any, of the villagers had seen us. Except for the toddlers. The MPs milled around for a while, inspecting the tiny barnlike structures that were just big enough to house one animal. Usually an ox. The MP who seemed to be in charge gazed up past the cabbage patches into the woods but didn’t show any enthusiasm for continuing further. He gathered his men and marched them back to the road.
On the field radio back at the checkpoint, he’d report our sighting to the Division PMO. In minutes, Bufford and Weatherwax and whatever reinforcements they could muster would be on their way south. We had a blonde American female with us. There’d be no doubt it was us.
“Let’s move out,” Ernie said.
Jill nodded, so did I. No discussion necessary.
The rest of the day consisted of a long afternoon and a longer night. We stayed away from the Main Supply Route and military patrols and military checkpoints. We cadged rides on three-wheeled tractors, on the backs of trucks, and even, for a while, on an ox-drawn cart. Steadily but surely we made our way north. After night fell, we walked; afraid to take one of the country kimchee cabs because the Division MP checkpoints would be moving from spot to spot and their mobile patrols would be prowling the back roads. Best to stay on foot, on ancient pathways leading from village to village. As far as I knew, the Division MPs didn’t even know these pathways existed.
Convoys of headlights prowled the paved roads.
Finally, about an hour before the midnight curfew, we stopped at a yoinsuk, a traditional Korean inn. It was situated atop a gently sloping hill that had three pedestrian pathways leading to it, but no parking lot. The building’s lumber was ancient; it had probably been constructed long before the Korean War. When I asked the proprietress about it, she told me that the inn had been built before the Japanese Occupation in 1910, back in those halcyon days when the king of Korea still sat on his throne in Seoul. The name of the inn was the Chowol-tang, Temple of the Autumn Moon.
It was a dump.
The soup they brought had no meat in it, only bean curd, and I had to pluck a couple of tiny pebbles out of the rice that accompanied the soup. Still, after a day of hiking through the hills of Kyongki Province, the chow tasted delicious. Once again, we three slept in the same room, on the warm ondol floor, but this time a family of strangers stayed with us, huddled together on the other side of the room. After eating, I was too exhausted to even attempt to speak Korean to them, so I spread out my gray cotton sleeping mat, pulled a tattered silk comforter over my sore shoulders, and was asleep before my head hit the bean-filled pillow.
At dawn, the three of us were up and ready to go. I sorely wished that I could take a shower and change into clean clothes, but there were no shower facilities here at the Temple of the Autumn Moon and the bag containing my change of clothes had been left behind after Ernie and I were ambushed at fish heaven. I was stuck with the same old sports shirt, the same old blue jeans, and the same old nylon jacket. After using the outdoor byonso, we declined breakfast, hoping we could find something better down the road. We did. Pears plucked fresh from an orchard.
Before noon, we stood on a hill looking down on the fog-shrouded city of Tongduchon. To the east, Camp Casey spread like a slothful potentate reclining across acres of arable land. Behind the heavily fortified main gate, the statue of the twenty-foot-tall MP, his pink face still smiling, seemed to be staring right at us.
First, I found a phone.
In a run-down teahouse a couple of blocks west of the Tongduchon City Market, the place where Ernie and I’d been shot at. The sleepy propriet
ress barely found the energy to shove my two hundred won into the pocket of her sleeping robe. Then she shoved the red phone across the counter, turned, and slid back a door that led to her sleeping quarters. She wasn’t open for business yet but Ernie and I had insisted she open.
I dialed the number for the 8th Army operator and waited. And waited. And waited. I hung up and tried again.
Still the same sound of static and clicking, but no human voice.
“The lines are down,” Ernie said.
Happens all the time, but why now?
“We’ll try again later,” Jill said.
“Right.”
I tried not to let it bother me. Still, it seemed an omen. Ernie and I were in over our heads, 8th Army wasn’t backing us up, the 2nd Division provost marshal had apparently unleashed his men on a murderous rampage. How often do GIs knowingly shoot at other GIs?
Not often. GIs steal from one another, they seduce one another’s wives, they lie about one another in order to cop a quick promotion, they do all those things but they seldom shoot at one another. Still, that’s exactly what’d been happening routinely ever since Brandy brought Ernie and me back to Division.
“Brandy,” I said. “At the Black Cat Club.”
“Too dangerous,” Ernie replied.
He meant that the ville would probably be crawling with MPs.
Jill started to tell us about Brandy.
“She was nice to me,” Jill told us. “She helped me find my hooch and she introduced me to Kim Yong-ai and then she even came to my hooch to show me how to change charcoal and where the trash goes and things like that.”
Since we had a minute, I asked Jill what exactly had happened at the Forest of the Seven Clouds. How had she and Kim Yong-ai managed to escape when Bufford and Weatherwax had come looking for her?
“Colonel Han,” she said. “A ROK Army colonel. He’d been in there before with important businessmen and Kimmie and I served him. He speaks English really well and he was curious about my situation, but I didn’t tell him that I was AWOL. The day Bufford and Weatherwax came looking for me, Colonel Han put me and Kim in the back of his canvas-covered jeep, threw a tarp over us, and drove us right past the checkpoints the MPs had set up.”
It figured. In Korea, what with 700,000 bloodthirsty communist soldiers across the DMZ just itching to invade, the ROK Army is untouchable. Even the president of the country is a former ROK Army general. Nobody can inspect ROK Army jeeps. Not even 2nd Infantry Division MPs.
The idea hit me suddenly. It seemed so obvious, once I thought about it, that I must’ve been awfully tired not to have thought of it earlier.
“I know where we can find a phone.”
“We have a phone,” Ernie said.
“But also a place to hide out, while we wait for the lines to be reconnected.”
Ernie saw it, too. “The Chon family residence,” he said.
Then I told Jill about what Madame Chon had said about a wandering ghost. And about the kut. Without hesitation, Jill agreed to help.
Ten minutes later, we were standing at the front gate of the Chon family residence.
Jill pressed the button of the intercom and told the person who answered who she was. Immediately, the gate buzzed open. The elderly maid stepped off the lacquered front porch and into her slippers, and following her came Madame Chon. She rushed toward Jill, her arms thrown open, and the two women embraced. Both of them were crying.
I turned to Ernie. He turned away from the two women. Then he said, “Enough of this bullshit. Let’s go shoot somebody.”
“We will,” I told him. “But first we have to talk to a ghost.”
The only light in the large back room of the Chon family residence came from the flickering glow of thirty-six candles. Above the candles sat a gleaming bronze effigy of Kumbokju, the chubby god of plenty of Korean myth. The sharp tang of incense permeated the room, and about thirty guests sat on the floor on plump, silk-covered cushions. The guest list included myself, Ernie, Corporal Jill Mathewson, and what seemed like every middle-aged matron in the city of Tongduchon. Since his daughter’s death, Chon Un-suk’s father had been working long hours at his business in Seoul and seldom showed his face in Tongduchon. Maybe because of grief. Maybe he had a mistress. Who knows? But one thing I knew for sure is that no self-respecting Korean male wants to attend a kut.
The name of the mudang was the Widow Po.
She was a tall woman, buxom, with a regal, oval-shaped face that might’ve been beautiful except that her skin had been ravaged by smallpox. Her black hair was long and tangled and now streaked with sweat. She had begun her ceremony by banging on a handheld drum and dancing, then shaking rattles and shrieking at the top of her lungs, all designed, Madame Chon told us, to frighten away evil spirits. It had worked pretty well. The 2nd Division MPs hadn’t come anywhere near.
The time now was midnight. Madame Chon, in her usual gracious style, had allowed us to eat and bathe and rest; Ernie and Jill Matthewson and I felt a lot more human. While we’d rested, I had managed to put a call through to the 8th Army CID Detachment.
“Smitty came up with the records,” Riley told me. “Beaucoup purchases out of the Camp Casey PX. Then I did what you told me. I laid it all on the desk of the 8th Army provost marshal. I told him what you said about the mafia meetings and the rape of the stripper and the systematic black-marketing at the Turkey Farm. I even told him about your suspicions concerning the death of this Private Marvin Druwood.”
“How’d he react?”
“How do you think he reacted? He went ballistic. First, you and Ernie go AWOL, you don’t leave the Division area of operations as ordered, and now you’re casting aspersions on the integrity of every ranking field-grade officer on the Division staff.”
I waited.
“They want your ass back here,” Riley said. “They want your report in person and they want it now.”
“If we do that,” I told him, “Division will have time to cover up all the evidence, threaten their MPs so they won’t testify, and nobody will be busted for anything.”
“How’s that your lookout? You’re supposed to report to the PMO. That’s it!”
“That’s not it,” I said. “As part of the Division attempt to cover up, they’ve shot at Ernie and me, trying to kill us, and they might’ve murdered Private Druwood. And maybe a ROK civilian by the name of Pak Tong-i.”
“You have no proof.”
I did what I seldom do. Instead of reasoning with the man I was having a disagreement with, I started screaming.
“How in the hell am I going to get proof if I have to return to Seoul?”
Riley waited for the sound of my voice to fade. Then he said calmly, “They didn’t buy it, Sueño. You have to come back.”
I waited, allowing the pause to grow.
He said, “Sueño? Sueño? You don’t want to do this.”
I listened to his breathing for a while. Then I hung up the phone.
A row of candles flickered in the darkness of the main worship hall. Food had already been served. Food for the kut. The séance. Rice dumplings, for the spirits supposedly, but Ernie grabbed a couple and popped them in his mouth. When glasses were poured full of soju for the pleasure of spirits from the great beyond, the neighbor women helping Madame Chon realized that Ernie wasn’t able to resist. Instead of making him suffer, they poured an extra glassful for him. He offered me some but I refused, as did Jill. His behavior, as is the case so often, was irreverent. Ernie has no time for proprieties, for ancient customs, even for respect for the dead. But I noticed that neither the local women, nor Madame Chon, nor even the smiling bronze face of Kumbokju, seemed offended. Only Jill and I were embarrassed. But when Jill leaned toward me and started to complain about Ernie, I placed my hand on her forearm and told her to be patient. I was right. As time went by, the women fed Ernie more and more dumplings and poured him more and more soju. Apparently, what Jill and I considered bad manners, they recognized as signs of pos
session.
Suddenly, from within the crowd, one of the women started chanting. Her voice was strained, singsong, as if she were warbling some sort of discordant tune. Madame Chon translated for me. “Her son is speaking,” she said. “He was killed in a car accident.”
“Killed?” I asked.
“Yes. Twenty years ago. She all the time come kut.”
Madame Chon’s answer was completely matter-of-fact. She and all the women in this room believed that communion with the dead was routinely achieved by mudang such as the Widow Po.
Jill Matthewson, listening to our conversation, rubbed her upper arms and bowed her head and murmured a prayer.
The Widow Po beat her drum and danced closer to the wailing woman.
“Mal hei,” the Widow Po said. Speak. “Mal hei, Wan-sok-i.”
Apparently, Wan-sok was the spirit’s name.
Wan-sok’s mother, still using a tightly pitched voice, started to speak.
“I’m cold, mother,” the voice said. “I’m cold because I’ve lost your warmth. Why, when I was alive, did you treat me so badly? Why, when I was alive, did you give me everything for which I asked? Why, when I was alive, did you purchase me a car? Why, when I was alive, did you let me go out at night? Why, when I was alive, did you let me drive so fast? Why, when I was alive, did you not keep me closer to your heart? Why, when I was alive, did you turn your back on me?”
Then the woman shrieked and collapsed into the arms of the women around her.
Ernie sipped on his soju. “Phony,” he said. Jill elbowed him.
The Widow Po banged rapidly on her drum. “Hear me, oh spirit,” she shouted. “Hear me, spirit of Wan-sok. What kind of son are you to punish your mother? What kind of son are you to blame her for your greed? What kind of son are you to torment the woman who gave you birth? Desist spirit!” She banged on the drum. “Desist in your lies!” She banged again. “Desist in your torment of your good mother!” This time she banged repeatedly, deafeningly, and the woman who had fainted groaned and started to come to.