The Door to Bitterness gsaeb-4

by Martin Limon

  “That woman,” I said, “who is she?”

  “Girl, more likely. That’s why they bring them out here. So they won’t get busted by the KNPs for being under eighteen.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Business girls. Out here to make a few bucks. Turn a few tricks.”

  “Out here?”

  “Sure. They probably operate out of that village we passed, Uichon. Think about it. Units rotate in and out of these ranges constantly. Each one chock full of horny young GIs. And no competition. You take a few girls out here, and you have all that GI money to yourself.”

  I stared at him. Still trying to fathom who would voluntarily come out into this cold and mud.

  “Look,” he said, pointing. “Behind the girl, about twenty yards away from the wire.”

  I scanned the tall grass. The tips of the vegetation were illuminated by the three-quarters moon, swaying in a soft breeze. Judging from the position of the girl, and the guard she was talking to, the grass must’ve been four feet tall. But ten yards farther in, away from the wire, a square patch of grass was missing. I studied the patch, and then I saw something pop up, something round.

  “See?” Ernie said. “More girls. Back there. Waiting to see what kind of business the other one can drum up. They’d send the prettiest one first.”

  I turned and studied Ernie. He was intent on the scene below us.

  “How do you know all these things?”

  “Years of research,” he said. Then he shushed me and pointed again.

  Another GI was now standing behind the guard. They were talking. The girl moved back into the high grass. Then the two GIs moved quickly. If I hadn’t been watching, I might’ve missed it. The guard leaned down, grabbed a handful of concertina wire, and lifted. The other GI dropped to his belly and low-crawled forward. Within seconds he was through the wire, crouching and moving quickly into the grass.

  “Come on,” Ernie said.

  He charged straight over the hill, veering to his right, away from Charley Battery’s encampment. I followed. Within seconds we were on level ground, crouching and moving as quietly as we could through the same high grass that the GI and the girl were using for concealment.

  Every minute or two, I poked my head up to see if the guards inside the Charley Battery perimeter had spotted us. I didn’t particularly want to be mistaken for a North Korean commando. But the guard we had seen earlier had moved away from this side of the perimeter. There was no one in sight.

  When we approached the rectangular opening in the grass, Ernie stopped and motioned for me to be quiet. I came to a halt, listening.

  Giggles, whispering, the rustle of grass and clothing.

  Ernie inched forward and motioned for me to follow.

  It wasn’t prurient interest that kept me moving forward. Not alone, anyway. But I knew that we had to talk to GIs in Charley Battery and preferably GIs who knew Private Rodney Boltworks. A guy like this GI, who’d leave his unit’s perimeter and risk court-martial or Article-15 for deserting his post, is a guy who would most likely know a troublemaker like Boltworks. And if we caught this GI, whoever he was, in flagrante delicto, we’d have leverage over him. He’d have to tell us everything he knew, and tell it straight. At least that’s what I was hoping for.

  What Ernie was hoping for, I wasn’t quite sure.

  We crept ever closer to the mashed-down grass. Now we could hear heavy breathing. Ernie turned, looked at me, and in the moonlight I could see his grin. He raised three fingers and started counting down: One, two, three.

  Ernie rose to his feet and burst into the clearing.

  I expected the women to scream but they didn’t. They were seasoned pros. But they did scoot back from their squatting positions, covering their mouths with their hands, and stared at us in wide-eyed astonishment. There were three of them, all bundled in thick jackets and mittens and wool scarves, as if expecting to be out in this cold weather for many hours. In front of them, on a blanket spread atop crumpled grass, lay a GI. All I could see of him was the back of his field jacket and his green fatigue trousers. Sticking out on either side of him were two small hands and two small feet. I noticed that the feet were incongruously shod with knitted wool socks.

  Ernie grabbed the GI by the scruff of his neck and brutally jerked him backwards.

  “What the…?”

  From nowhere, Ernie’s. 45 glistened in the moonlight, the tip of the oil-slick barrel pointing straight up into the GI’s nostril. He was a black man, or at least partly black. Very light-skinned and slightly chubby around the jowls.

  “Move and I’ll blow your dick off,” Ernie said.

  The GI started cussing. The girl beneath him squealed and kicked her way back into the grass. Of the three women sitting across from us, two of them were young and one was old. Very old. I spoke to her in Korean, not bothering to use honorifics for the elderly.

  “Weikurei yogi-ei?” What the hell are you doing here?

  She answered in Korean, her withered hand pressed against her chest, and told me that Ernie and I had given her quite a start. I told her to shut up, while Ernie let the GI pull up his fatigue pants. I saw by the tag on his field jacket that his name was Taggard. He wasn’t wearing any rank insignia. That meant that he was a private E-nothing. Busted down to the lowest possible military rank.

  “Court-martial time,” Ernie told Taggard. “Article Fifteen at least. You know you’re not supposed to be out here. What if there’s a fire mission? And the women out here are off limits. They probably don’t even have VD cards.”

  Taggard cussed a little more, trying to regain some of the dignity he’d lost.

  Ernie had referred to these prostitutes as women but they were, in fact, only girls. Fifteen or sixteen years old, I estimated. One still sported the Buster Brown haircut that middle-school girls in Korea are required to wear. Probably from poor families, sold to this old witch sitting here who was pretending to act so shocked at the intrusion.

  Did the Korean National Police in Uichon know about this operation? Certainly, they did. A group of teenage girls living with an old crone, with no visible means of support? The KNPs knew. Worse, they were probably receiving a cut of the action.

  “All right, Taggard,” Ernie said. “That’s your name, isn’t it? Unless you borrowed somebody else’s field jacket. No. Couldn’t be. Nobody else in the unit could be that fat.”

  Taggard’s cheeks bulged with anger. Ernie held the. 45 aimed at his face, although I knew the charging handle hadn’t been pulled back. Ernie couldn’t have shot Taggard if he’d wanted to. Fortunately, Taggard didn’t know that.

  “I’m going to ask you some questions, Private Taggard,” Ernie said. “After each one you’re going to give me an answer. Understand? You’re not going to give me any bullshit or any excuses about why you don’t know. You’re just going to give me an answer. Got that?”

  When Taggard didn’t reply, Ernie clanged back the charging handle of the. 45, pressed it hard up against Taggard’s nose, and repeated the question, pronouncing each word slowly.

  “Do you understand that?”

  Reluctantly, Taggard nodded. Beads of perspiration broke out on his forehead.

  I considered jumping on Ernie, wrestling the. 45 away from him. But that might cause the gun to go off. Would he really shoot Taggard? From the look on Ernie’s face, I couldn’t be sure. He was enraged. In Inchon, when we gazed at the wounded Han Ok-hi in her oxygen tent, and at the Yellow House, when we examined the cigarette burns along Mi-ja’s arm, and then, in Songtan, when we saw the blood exsanguinated from the body of Jo Kyong-ah, Ernie had acted as if he were just a cop doing a job. No emotion showed on his face. But now his face was a mask of rage. He’d caught someone in the act of committing a crime: having sex for pay with an underage girl. What worried me most was that he was going to take all his rage and frustration out on a miscreant GI named Taggard. Maybe Taggard deserved to have his ass kicked. He probably even deserved time in
the stockade, but he didn’t deserve to be shot dead.

  “Boltworks,” Ernie said. “Rodney, K., Private First Class. Talk!”

  “Asshole,” Taggard said.

  “Explain!”

  “He was an asshole, that’s all. Always messing with people. When he lost his ration control privileges, he started pestering everybody else-Let me use your ration card for this; let me use it for that. He beat up a few of the wimpy dudes in the battery and made them buy some shit out of the PX for him, but he knew better than to mess with me.”

  “I’ll bet,” Ernie said. “How long has he been gone?”

  “Ask mama-san. She knows.”

  The old woman and her girls slid back even further into the grass. I told her in Korean to stay right where she was.

  “What do you mean?” Ernie asked Taggard.

  “Bolt was the first one out here.”

  “Bolt?”

  “Yeah. That’s what we called Boltworks. Every time we were in the field, he’d find mama-san and her girls. Had a nose for pussy until he smelled the wrong kind.”

  Ernie shoved the tip of the. 45 back toward his nose. “Go on,” he said.

  On the other side of the wall of grass, I noticed some movement of lights. Probably just the perimeter guards.

  “Why you want me to tell you?” Taggard said. “Ask mama-san.”

  “I’m asking you,” Ernie replied.

  Taggard sighed. A gentleman, hugely inconvenienced.

  “Boltworks came out here for one particular girl.”

  “Pretty?”

  “Better than these pug-nosed bitches. Boltworks was greedy. Kept her all to himself, alone, way over there in the grass all night.”

  Taggard pointed vaguely into the distance.

  “Didn’t Boltworks have guard duty?”

  “He didn’t mess with that shit. Told somebody else to pull it for him.”

  “Paid them?”

  “Hell no. Boltworks was crazy. Guys’d pull his guard duty just so he wouldn’t mess with them. Not me though.

  I wasn’t afraid of him.”

  “Tell me about the girl.”

  “He used to take her every time we came out to Nightmare Range. Give mama-san here some tambay or something.” Cigarettes. “And then one night we heard a lot of noise. Not screaming or crying or anything like that, but fighting. A couple of the other guys went over, and they found the girl bloodied up. She was too pretty, almost blonde, you know. She crazy though. Still smiling. That big smile of hers she always had no matter what.”

  I felt dizzy for a moment. The smiling woman, the one who’d sat at a table with me in the King Club in Itaewon, the woman who’d drugged me, the woman who’d escorted the dark GI onto the train at Inchon Station-that’s who he was talking about.

  “So what happened to Boltworks?” Ernie asked.

  “Mama-san here wanted more money, for the blonde girl’s hospital bills and shit like that, but Boltworks told her to go screw herself. Then she took her girls and left and the next time we came out to Nightmare Range, she and her little bitches weren’t out here. Everybody was pissed, but nobody said nothing to Boltworks.”

  “Too scared?”

  “They were. Not me.”

  “And that’s it?” Ernie said.

  “I told you, ask the mama-san.”

  “I’m asking you.”

  Taggard shrugged. “You going to turn me in, or what?”

  “Depending,” Ernie said. “Talk.”

  “So we come back to Nightmare Range and suddenly mama-san’s back, with new girls and everything, and the blonde girl, she back, smiling as usual and she takes Boltworks by the hand and leads him out into the high grass and… ”

  As if a bolt of lightning had struck, the world was suddenly full of light. I covered my eyes, cursing myself for not staying alert.

  “Freeze!” a voice shouted.

  Shading my eyes from the glare of a half-dozen beams of light, I could still make out dark shadows standing in front of us. A few of them held long, dark objects. Rifles.

  Ernie lifted his. 45 straight up in the air.

  “Set it down, mister,” a voice said. “Slow and easy.”

  He did.

  Something poked me in the arm.

  With an effort, I opened my eyes. Something was pressing against my hip, my elbow and shoulder, and my neck was twisted at an awkward angle.

  I looked up to find a stern-faced Korean man glaring at me. Wearing khaki. I sat upright.

  Where was I?

  Then I remembered. We were in the police station in the village of Uichon. Was I locked up? No. This was the police station lobby, in front of the desk sergeant’s counter. Both Ernie and I had passed out on the wooden benches against the front wall. There were no hotels in Uichon; not even a yoguan, a Korean inn. So the local KNPs had allowed us to sleep here rather than in our open-topped jeep.

  Ernie sat up and rubbed his eyes. The Korean cop stared, making sure we were awake. He was a slightly cross-eyed young man and the dull curiosity in his eyes made me understand how a gorilla in a cage at the zoo must feel when being stared at by tourists. The young cop turned and walked back behind the partition, where his desk overlooked the public entrance. Cold air poured in through open doors. Outside, the barest glimmer of gray appeared at the edges of a dark sky.

  “I feel like shit,” Ernie said.

  “Don’t ask me how you look.”

  Last night, while we were busy interviewing Private Taggard in the tall grass, the perimeter guards around the Charley Battery encampment had noticed something amiss. They’d alerted their commander, one Captain Floyd Lewis, and he’d organized a detail of men and surrounded us before we knew what was happening. After taking Ernie’s. 45, Lewis marched us back inside the Charley Battery area and sat us down on folding stools inside the ten-man tent that served as temporary Command Post.

  I tried to tell him that the business girls outside the wire were getting away, but all he said was, “What business girls?”

  Typically, he pretended he hadn’t seen the women, and he also pretended that he didn’t know what was going on outside his concertina wire. The brass monkey act: hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. The road to advancement in the United States Army. Captain Lewis was much more concerned with the fact that Ernie had pulled a gun on one of his soldiers.

  We showed him our identification and told him why we were here. When Ernie mentioned General Armbrewster’s name, Captain Lewis fired up his communications equipment. After a few minutes, he received confirmation via radio that he was to provide us with full cooperation. Butt first, Lewis handed Ernie his gun back.

  After slipping the. 45 into his shoulder holster, Ernie pulled out the three sketches and laid them on the wooden field table.

  Taggard flinched. “What the hell did he do?”

  Instead of answering, Ernie said, “You know him?”

  “That’s Bolt.”

  Taggard pointed at the sketch of the man we’d been calling “the Caucasian GI.” We now had a name to go with the face: Private First Class Rodney K. Boltworks, absent without leave from Charley Battery, 2nd of the 17th Field Artillery.

  “How about her?” Ernie asked Taggard studied the sketch of the smiling woman.

  “She looks a little more cleaned up now,” he said. “But that’s her. The blond bitch who used to work outside the wire.”

  “She’d been one of them?” Ernie asked.

  “Yeah,” Taggard answered. “Same crew. Same mama-san. Everything.”

  “What happened to her?”

  Taggard shook his head slowly. “Bolt liked her. Used to hog her, matter of fact, like I was telling you. Not give the rest of us a shot. Got so bad he started beating on her when she complained about not making enough money. Then one night a couple months ago, he took her out in the bushes, and while he was out there, somebody started beating on him.”

  Taggard grinned at the memory. One of his front teeth was missing. />
  “Who?” I asked.

  “Don’t know. But Bolt was bruised up pretty bad. Must’ve been a good fight. Wouldn’t tell us who did it to him.”

  “And the girl?”

  “She disappeared. Later that night, so did Bolt.”

  Captain Lewis stood with his arms crossed, rocking on his heels, not liking this testimony at all. He was a tall, lean man with a short crew cut.

  “How about it, Captain?” Ernie asked. “Is that when Rodney Boltworks disappeared?”

  “Almost two months ago. July seventeenth,” he said. “While we were camped in this area. Haven’t seen him since.”

  I spoke to Taggard. “So Boltworks goes out in the bush with this business girl. He gets in a fight with somebody who wastes him pretty bad. He limps back to the encampment and, later that night, he disappears?”

  “Exactly what happened.”

  “Why?” I said.

  Taggard grinned again.

  “Why?” Taggard repeated. “I don’t know for sure, but I think he liked it.”

  “Liked what?”

  Taggard’s grin grew wider. “I think he liked the ass-kicking he got.”

  Ernie and I glanced at one another, not sure how to proceed on that line of questioning. Ernie pointed at the sketch of the dark man with the curly brown hair.

  “Do you know who this guy is?”

  Taggard shook his head. So did Captain Lewis.

  I wasn’t surprised. The sketch was pretty vague. A dark man with an oval-shaped face and opaque sunglasses covering his eyes. He could’ve been a Korean, an American. He could’ve been a lot of things.

  We prevailed on the good captain to bring every soldier in Charley Battery into the Command tent, one at a time. We paraded them past the three sketches. To a man, everyone knew Boltworks. A handful recognized the smiling woman, but not one recognized the dark man with the curly brown hair.

  Afterwards, Ernie and I drove back to Uichon and asked the night duty officer at the Korean National Police Station to help us find the mama-san and the girls who worked the encampments in this area. The guy was adamant. He would give us no information, not without clearing it with his superiors. And since it was already past the midnight curfew, we would have to wait until morning to talk to the commander of the Uichon police station.