Nightmare Range

by Martin Limon

  One of the girls slipped something into my hand. It was a temporary ration card issued by the Osan Ration Control Office. She pouted.

  “He said he would give me more money later, when he comes back, and he gave me this.” The temporary card was only good for a month, and on his next trip to Korea he’d easily be able to get another. I shook my head.

  “It’s not worth much.”

  She sighed. “You keep it then. Are all GIs big liars?”

  I nodded somberly and put the card in my pocket. The name on it was typed neatly. Faulkner, Robert R.

  Korean has no letter for F, so a hard P is usually substituted. The letters L and R are interchangeable and sometimes dropped. “Pok-no” was a reasonable good transliteration of the name Faulkner.

  More food and more rice wine were brought out. Korean men entered the shop, and some of the girls drifted off toward them. Everyone seemed quite happy to see Americans in such an out of the way place, as if we confirmed that White Cloud Mountain was a spot well worth visiting. The night turned out to be a great success, Ernie was in a rage of blissfulness, and the ladies of Ok-dong were all they promised they’d be.

  We didn’t leave until morning.

  At the Osan provost marshal’s office the next day we had the teletype operation transmit a message to Iwakuni Air Force Base in Okinawa with the names of the three Marines. While we waited for the response, we went to the snack bar and loaded up on fried eggs and bacon and hash browns.

  “Could you believe those chicks last night?” Ernie asked.

  “They’ve never talked to Americans before,” I said. “We were a novelty.”

  “Damn. If it’d been any more of a novelty, they would’ve killed me.” He sipped on his coffee. “So we recommend approval of the claim, huh?”

  “I don’t see why not. Another case of a GI’s gonads guiding his common sense.”

  “Understandable.”

  “Yeah.”

  After breakfast, we still had more time to kill, so we stopped at the base library. I found a book on Taoist cosmology and found out that the Jade Emperor was indeed considered to be the supreme god of the universe. His powers were somewhat limited, however, since the Tao itself, the inexplicable principles that rule existence, cannot be broken but only followed, even by gods of immense power.

  His-wang-mo, the Goddess of the Moon and the dispenser of the elixir of immortality, was a little more to my liking. A beautiful woman, she was changeable like the moon itself, and as such she was the goddess of the seasons and the weather and of all things that were always in flux—which seemed like everything to me. An engraving in the book looked much like the second shrine we had seen in the little hut on White Cloud Mountain.

  In a book on Korean rhetoric, I couldn’t find any reference to a saying like “leaving with the Moon Goddess.” I asked the Korean librarian, but she had never heard of it. I wrote it off as just the mutterings of a bunch of party girls.

  When we returned to the Osan PMO, the transmission was waiting for us. Jordan and Thompson had been located easily. The problem was that Lance Corporal Robert R. Faulkner had not yet returned to Okinawa and was being carried by his unit as absent without leave. They told us that if we found him we should arrest him—and send him back under armed guard.

  The evidence was too thin to involve the Korean police, so Ernie and I strode resolutely past the police station through the main street of Ok-dong without stopping and, even though the shadows of the pines were growing longer, hiked up the side of White Cloud Mountain.

  When we crossed the crest that led to the Temple of the Jade Emperor, I shouted, but no one emerged from the rickety hut. We checked inside. Empty.

  Ernie kicked around in the turnip patch until he came upon a rectangular clump of fresh black soil. He searched behind the hut and found a shovel, and we started to dig.

  The Temple of the Jade Emperor was also a shrine to the Moon Goddess, and it wasn’t too surprising that the girls of the Ok-dong soju house called the crazy woman who tended the shrine the Moon Goddess. After her humiliation, it was only natural that Miss Won would’ve returned up here to her sister’s hut and told her about the betrayal by her American boyfriend.

  Won Un-suk had told us that after her sister left with her boyfriend that night she had never seen her again. Maybe she was lying. Or maybe she meant it in a spiritual sense: she had never again seen the innocent person who had once been her sister.

  The concerned nun might’ve gone into the village herself to talk to the wayward young man. Had she brought him back up here? Maybe they’d talked. What had happened then I didn’t know, but I did know that Faulkner had never made it back to Osan in time to catch his flight to Okinawa.

  The jolt in Ernie’s shovel answered the question.

  We bent down and scraped away the dirt. As flesh came into view, we did our best to hold our breath to protect ourselves from the rotten odor.

  We cleared away more of the earth. In the fading light of sunset his skin seemed to have a green pallor, but it was the stomach that startled us most. Ernie jumped back, and we peered down into the pit.

  “Looks like he swallowed a damned bowling ball,” Ernie said. “I’ve never seen a stomach so distended.”

  “What could it have been?”

  “I don’t have any idea.”

  We threw a couple of feet of dirt back on the body and went into the hut to wait. Ernie watched out the window on one side, I watched out the other. Three hours later large black clouds rolled in but scurried away, as if anxious to flee the neighborhood.

  “I’m not going to sit up here all night,” Ernie said. “What we do is we go back down the mountain, report it, get a team up here to exhume the body, and we’re through.”

  “But she might slip away.”

  “She’s already gone.”

  I sighed. “You’re probably right.”

  We walked outside the hut. Another cloud rolled away and the face of the full moon glimmered down on the turnip patch.

  “The Moon Goddess is watching,” I said.

  “Knock that crap off,” Ernie replied.

  We started down the path.

  At the first bend in the trail the moonlight lit up a granite cliff in front of us almost as brightly as the white screen of a drive-in movie. I hadn’t noticed it on the way up because our backs were to it, and in the light of day it would just be another rock. Something darted across the cliff. I grabbed Ernie’s arm.

  “Look! Up there. On a ledge on the granite cliff.”

  Ernie squinted.

  “I’ll be damned.”

  “It looks like her.”

  “Yeah.”

  We scrambled toward the cliff and found a pathway leading up. Soon we were climbing above the pines. The moonlight beat down on us, and with the reflection off the smooth granite the sky around us seemed almost as bright as day. The valley below crouched like some dark creature.

  The ledge narrowed, and when we rounded a corner, we saw her, sitting atop a large boulder that leaned out into the open air above the abyss.

  “Welcome,” she said, “to the realm of the Goddess of the Moon.”

  She waved her hand at us.

  “No. Don’t come any closer. You will be severely punished if you do.” She held a jade tumbler no larger than a small wine carafe up into the moonlight. “I will deny you the Elixir of Immortality.”

  She lowered the tumbler into her lap and laughed softly.

  “It’s the same formula Lao-tze took before passing beyond the Gates of the Western Mountains into the land of the immortals. It has taken me years to perfect it. I wanted my sister to take it but she was of small mind, so instead I challenged her boyfriend, the young American, to try it. He was very bold. Or maybe it was the rice wine he had consumed with the brazen ladies of Ok-dong. But whatever the reason, he grabbed it out of my hand and poured it straight down his throat.”

  She lowered her eyes. “I suppose he wasn’t ready for it.” She
glanced back up at us and laughed. “To follow the path of the Tao takes years of preparation. I saw you consulting with him in the turnip patch. I’m afraid he’s not too talkative now. My sister couldn’t get him to say a word, and when she couldn’t, she seemed frightened of him and ran away down the mountain. I was happy when I learned that she had found a way of transcending her troubles. Maybe she was, after all, wiser than I thought.”

  She held the tumbler out toward Ernie.

  “Will you have some? You seem like one who is wise enough in the ways of the Tao to sample the Jade Elixir. You will have immortality! No? No matter.”

  She raised the tumbler high above her head.

  “To the Goddess of the Moon!”

  As she opened her mouth and started to pour I ran forward, but the boulder was slippery and my leather shoes found no traction. Ernie was behind me and cupped his hands for my feet, and I slid up and over the curved surface. As I reached for her, she poured the last of the green fluid into her mouth. A violent eruption convulsed her stomach. I expected vomit to explode out of her mouth but instead she seemed to choke and then she dropped the tumbler and clenched her throat and the jade container clattered along the side of the cliff until it crashed into the rocks below.

  Ernie pushed again, but this time I found a handhold and resisted. I didn’t want to go sliding over the far edge of the rock.

  The nun stood and looked down at me, her face green, her throat shriveled up like a dried stick of bamboo, her eyes wide in terror. A croaking noise erupted from her open mouth and she stepped backward and her foot slipped. As I reached out, her hand slapped mine and slid off my fingers, and she vaulted into the black night, twirling end over end until her skull smashed into the rock below, cracking like a moist melon.

  I lay still, clinging to the rock for a long time until Ernie pulled me off the precipice.

  On the way back to Ok-dong long clouds skittered in front of the silver face of the moon, wavering in the wind, like silk streamers trailing after the Moon Goddess.

  SEOUL MOURNING

  Staff Sergeant Riley, the Admin NCO at the Criminal Investigation Detachment, plopped the big folder into my hands and somehow managed to smirk around buck teeth. Dark hair slicked back, so skinny he seemed to rattle inside his starched fatigue shirt, he pulled a pencil from behind his ear and tapped the eraser on the folder.

  “SOFA case,” he said. “Hot. For you and Ernie.”

  SOFA. A military acronym that stands for the Status of Forces Agreement. The treaty between Korea and the US that covers everything from criminal jurisdiction over military personnel to the prohibition on selling imported maraschino cherries down in the village.

  “SOFA case?” I always have something clever to say when I’m getting screwed. “How’d me and Ernie get it?”

  “Top figures you’ve been goofing off on the black market detail long enough. Besides, this thing is such a pile of manure that nobody else wants it.”

  He thumbed through the folder and pulled out a carbon-backed invoice. Five thousand bucks. To be delivered, in cash, to the family of Choi Un-suk, the little girl referred to in all the reports as “the victim.”

  Riley marched back to his desk and sat down, his gravelly voice rolling over a barricade of paper-clipped reports.

  “The first sergeant wants it taken care of,” he said. “Now!”

  Tonight, after a couple of shots of bourbon, Riley’d be the sweetest guy in the world. At work he was a bear.

  Arguing about an assignment once the decision had been made would be a waste of everybody’s time. Instead, I found a corner, sat down in a gray military chair, and thumbed through the folder.

  The title of the report was Serious Traffic Incident, which was a hell of an understatement. An American army jeep, traveling south on the Main Supply Route between Camp Red Cloud in Uijongbu and Yongsan Compound in Seoul, managed to kill a young girl, Choi Un-suk, age thirteen, a student at the Kuk-min Middle School.

  It didn’t run her over. According to one of the GI passengers, the driver, Private First Class Dwayne Ortfield, had been speeding and swerving through traffic the entire trip. The ten-foot antenna, bent forward from the radio in the back, hadn’t been properly secured. The front portion whipped from side to side. When he and the other two passengers complained, PFC Ortfield ignored them and kept driving at a high rate of speed.

  It was at a bus stop, crammed with black-suited children on their way to school, that PFC Ortfield tried to pass a taxicab on the right. One of the girls, the safety monitor, stood slightly off the curb. When she saw PFC Ortfield heading toward her, she turned, raised her white-gloved hand, and blew her whistle. Ortfield swerved away, but the antenna, obeying the immutable laws of physics, didn’t follow.

  The tip of the antenna jammed into the little girl’s eyeball, pierced her brain, and splattered half her skull over her screaming schoolmates.

  Private Ortfield didn’t want to stop, but after being punched by his passengers, he went back, supposedly to do what he could to help.

  They were forced to leave, however, because a mob formed before the arrival of the Korean National Police and the GIs in the jeep would have been, in all probability, torn limb from limb.

  Ortfield had a long history of traffic violations. But his MOS, his Military Occupational Specialty, was 64 Charlie, transportation. When he first joined up, he had been designated as a driver by the army, and despite the proofs of his incompetence, a driver he had remained. Until this.

  The Korean National Police turned jurisdiction over to US military authorities. The theory was that since he was army, let the army take care of him. Besides, we give their government millions of dollars in assistance each year. No one wants to cause hard feelings. American GIs are only sent to Korean courts when public outrage demands it. This was a small case, not well covered by the press. No outrage. Not yet.

  The court-martial was scheduled for this morning at the 8th Army judge advocate general’s office.

  Meanwhile, the family had filed a wrongful death claim with the United States government under the provisions of the Status of Forces Agreement. It had been approved. An easy way out of the mess for our side. Five thousand bucks. A tiny globule of wealth siphoned from a sea of taxpayer money.

  The hard part was having to stand face to face with the family, and that dirty job had fallen on us. But there was no way out.

  Ernie and I don’t have much bargaining power with the first sergeant. Ever since an incident over a year ago when we arrested the 8th Army chief of staff, he saw us as a couple of lowlifes. I’d been punished by having to serve a stint with an artillery unit along the DMZ. Ernie’d been relegated the black market detail, making sure Korean dependent wives didn’t buy too much coffee and mayonnaise out of the commissary and sell it for a profit in the ville.

  I wasn’t going to beg to get out of this. I’d do it and get it over with.

  While I was reading the report, Ernie wandered in. Late again. He sat next to Riley’s desk, feet up, sipping a cup of snackbar coffee. I strolled over and waved the folder under his nose.

  “Did Riley tell you about this SOFA case?”

  “Yeah,” Ernie said. “Crap City.”

  Riley didn’t look up from his paperwork. “I have every confidence that you two can handle it tactfully.”

  Ernie snorted, finished his coffee, and stood up. Ever since Vietnam, words like “tactful” have disappeared from Ernie’s vocabulary.

  Without looking back, we walked down the long hallway, pushed through the big double doors, and hopped down the stone steps of the CID building. We jumped into the jeep, and as Ernie started it up, he turned to me.

  “Who is this guy Ortfield anyway?”

  “A young driver who didn’t take his responsibilities seriously.”

  “I want to see him.”

  There was plenty of time, and I wasn’t in a hurry to face with this Korean family.

  “The court-marital starts in ten minutes.
”

  “Let’s go.”

  He shoved the jeep in gear, and we rolled down the tree-lined streets of Yongsan Compound.

  The 8th Army courthouse was a small brick building with red Korean tile on the roof turned up at the edges. Inside, a summary court-martial sat in session. The judges, a row of uniformed officers behind a high wooden panel, appeared properly somber. The prosecutor at one table shuffled paperwork. The defense lawyer, a young second lieutenant, conferred with the defendant, Private First Class Dwayne Ortfield.

  Ortfield sat hunched over, elbows on the table, listening to his army-appointed lawyer. His hair was longish on top, greased, hanging over his eyes. His dress green uniform hadn’t been properly pressed. With his monthly salary held in abeyance, he probably hadn’t been able to pay his houseboy since the death of Miss Choi Un-suk.

  Tough beans.

  Ernie and I passed the armed MP at the door, walked down the carpeted steps, and took seats in the gallery. I looked around for Choi Heng-sok, the father of the deceased girl. Neither he nor his lawyer had made an appearance. Since this court-martial was considered to be an internal US military affair, they probably hadn’t even been notified.

  The colonel in charge of the proceedings banged his gavel.

  Witnesses were called in rapid order. First, the MP on the scene, who confirmed what everybody already knew: he had found a dead girl surrounded by a lot of angry Koreans. He was followed by the Traffic Control Officer, who, although the milling crowds had pretty well messed up the evidence, managed to present the court with some well-done charts of what had happened. With a pointer he noted the position of the other cars, how Ortfield had swerved to his right, and where the antenna had swung out and pierced the thirteen-year-old girl through the eye.

  It was Ortfield’s passengers who did the most damage. They went over what they had written in their statements. That Ortfield was driving too fast, swerving around the road, cursing, not listening to reason.

  The whole thing went fast. A little less than two hours. Military justice at its best. I figured Ortfield would be spending a lot of years licking cement.