by Gus Lee
“Ip dakk chuh!” snapped the guard, a cocked Smith & Wesson service.38 revolver in his trembling gloved hand. Levine had taught me that one. It meant “Shut up!”
He shouted. Min exited the jeep. The guards backed up as I stood in the deep snow. They wore surplus U.S. Army World War II uniforms and gear with Arctic flap forage hats. Some shouted. Someone popped the hood as the jeep was searched. Two new guards pointed bayoneted M-l carbines at me while Pink Face waved his revolver, shouting an order. Min raised his arms.
No ROK paratroop major would raise his. “Uh-uuh.”
A guards officer came from the arched, stone entrance, jumping the steps two at a time. He churned through the snow, thick-bodied, with a fat, pockmarked face. He saluted. I returned it.
He spoke. I pointed at Min, who delivered the fable: In 1966, the fat foreign pig Curadess dishonored the major's father by saying he was a drug dealer. The major's father was beaten many times during questioning. Now, after seven years of crippled suffering, he has died. The major is here without authorization, risking a brilliant military career to fulfill his filial duty by reprimanding the foreigner. His hearing is permanently impaired. He cannot speak. Please help my major.
The officer looked critically at me, at my ear, wanting proof. To ask more questions would be rude; to ask none would be negligent. Yet the story explained my bizarre visit. He asked Min if I was half-Chinese. Min said yes. He asked me for ID.
He took the counterfeit ID with a bow. He glanced at it, then spoke rapidly, gutturally, but without anger, directing a frisk of Min and then personally frisking me. He removed my sunglasses to examine them. My heart stopped when he felt the contours of my Combat Infantryman Badge, a unique metal decoration; he noticed it, but passed on to my lower body. The captain nodded, his breath white, pointing me to the gate. Min was taken away. My sunglasses were returned.
I looked at the guards. They saluted. I returned it. I was escorted into a compound formed by ageless, inward-canting, Japanese stone walls. No guard towers. Long, squat, windowless concrete blocks—the prison cells.
The granite became an untamed, painful stone quarry that tore my boots. Ahead was a three-story concrete structure. Naktong.
The doors were six inches thick, a half-ton of Japanese steel moving on slow gimbals opening into a series of baffled and well-lit entrances emitting a terrible odor.
When the last double doors opened, the revolting stink hit me like a clean right cross that drew painless tears and a grunt. My senses rebelled at the living stench which rose from a frigid, cavernous concrete shaft, six or seven vertical stories into the earth. From this pit rose the repulsive miasma of human waste, unwashed men and nightmarish sewers.
Naktong was not a tower. It was a mine shaft, rich with veins of refuse, free-floating, unrestrained, organic and human. Guards held perfumed handkerchiefs over noses. One was offered to me. I wanted it but shook my head.
Someone clanged a cup against a steel bar. He was joined by others as some crowed hoarsely, the noise accumulating, encouraged by the echoes of a concrete-and-steel chorus, the curiously youthful music of old prisoners. The clanging became a discernible two-beat, and then evolved into a deep four-beat rhythm, ba-ba-bom-bom, a redundant drumming of hundreds of steel cups. This was not a chorus of inmate requests for food or rights; it was a hopeless complaint against stink and boredom, tuned up for the oddity of a ROK officer come to Naktong Tower. The guards looked at me warily.
The beat was compelling, mesmerizing, a sound of early tribes defeated by nature and by stronger warriors, drumming now for blood and vengeance by noise or any means, a syncopated metallic Korean marimba driven by hard lockdown, orchestrated in dead man's air and performed at the appearance of a single stranger.
I looked at the music men as I followed the guard down the stairs, breathing tersely, boots echoing on the hollow steel stairs in time to the four-beat drums. A thin, sad man in yellow utilities tried to join the band with his cup, but atrophied muscles and a slowed mind permitted only an occasional silent clang. On the fifth level down I had to take a breath and almost threw up because the stink was worse. I hesitated as an Australian voice seemed to say, “Mate, can you talk English? Call my pop will ya!“A long, pale, European face, wild eyes searching mine for solace. Foreign prisoner.
I am a ROK major whose father was sullied by foreigners. I am not who I am. I looked away and felt like a traitor.
“Gan-bang myunhae shill,” said the guard. The lawyers’ interview cell in Naktong's dank security basement. Dark sludge flowed from a wall crack and covered the floor. I removed my sunglasses and closed my eyes to adjust to the low light, breathing through a mothballed sleeve.
Bugs slithered over my boots and the green floor. A guard entered. He lit an incense stick and blew it out, freeing the sweet paste. Hands joined in the center of his chest, he bowed, smiling as men will who devoutly believe in God. His smile warmed the cell, but I ignored him. I was a ROK paratroop field grade officer with an injured and mummified face, come to do a solemn Confucian duty.
Rats scurried in pipes and scratched at the walls, excited by the incense. Cons screamed down at me while banging metal. A cup fell down the steel steps, making lonely notes of descending loss. The drumming of the cups slowed, became chaotic, started up again, then died. Later, in the fetid silence, the beat continued, unbidden, in my brain. Men wailed while others barked and screamed, exciting echoes of dying troops waiting for medevacs. The floor thickly oozed with brown and bright-green flying roaches.
There were lyrics to the tune: Don't break the law in the ROK, where punishments would hurt and food was below imagination. The collective fear soaked into my bones. I felt like a caged dog.
I rubbed my hands together, sniffing the red, glinting incense head and watching for rats. An inmate screamed, the object of a beating. Claustrophobia teased me.
I had left Cara for Jimmy and was here, playing out Murray's mission and Levine's instincts. I wondered what Levine's first name was. I remembered how she had looked into my eyes. I brushed roaches from my legs. I was in Asia, but this did not remind me of China.
BaBa shook me as I slept. BaBa's voice, husky and urgent, smelling of ginger and black tea, his big hand shaking me.
Hu-chin! Open eyes, Little Tiger, moon watch. The wind is up and a storm comes fast. It will tear the sateen sail.
Do not be don ko budong sho, a boy who moves mouth and not hands. You have job to do. Show your little brothers how a man does work.
His strong hand lifted me from my cotton pad. I stood on the quickly yawing deck, stretching and yawning and he laughed, rubbing the hair on my head.
He held little Hu-hau, Good Tiger, in a thick, rope-scarred arm. Good Tiger giggled at me, bright-eyed like Wen Ch'ang, the scholarship god who sat high in the night's north sky, and rubbed my head as our father had, his tiny hand pulling my hair.
17
PATRICK TREATY MC CRAIL
Three guards escorted him. It was McCrail, an immense three hundred pounds on a big-boned frame, older than his years. He was a sergeant major, a special station in the Army, and he was so-yang saram, a white foreign prisoner in Asia, which was such a vast misfortune that it nullified all the good in one's past.
McCrail matched the gray, grunge-sweat walls, his face crachin, the color of drizzly days in Nam, the product of bad food, no sun, vitamin deficiencies, a Western beard meeting a Far Eastern coldwater shave with a solitary convict's dull razor.
The sergeant major had a rocklike head, snow-white brows and a broad, angry fissure of a mouth formed by full, indignant lips. Coarse cut of white hair. Jowls of muscle and fat. Red, deep-shadowed eye sockets. Deep creases punctuating heavy brows. A slab of nose with generous nostrils. A massive man undiminished by the big trouble that had turned all the hair on his body white. His face was a terrain map where the weather never gave a break.
Shackles ran groin-neck-ankles, glinting against ill-fitting yellow utilities. The thud of the boots
on crackling bugs and cold concrete and the clink of his steel made a mournful soundtrack to a hanging.
I had seen bad prisons, sad jails and cannibals, but he was a spectacle beyond experience. I would've paid to see him. He saw me and laughed, high and girlishly, a white sound in a shadowed world, his torso undulating in fresh corpulence.
The guard cracked McCrail in the mouth with a big baton.
“Aniyo!” No! I blocked another blow with my upper arm and booted McCrail behind the knee as I shouldered him away from the guards. He fell and slid like a bag of cement thrown from a fast truck, kicking up a wake of scuttling insects. Hot pain sizzled up my arm from the baton, my hand numb.
I faced the guards, crushing roaches, and they backed up. McCrail spat out a brown tooth and shook away the blow, a mastiff in the rain, his leash complaining, blood on the bugs and the weeping floor.
Master Wong had taught me pain, but McCrail had taken a postdoctorate in anguish, going summa cum laude to the grunts of enemies and the mournful call of Army bugles.
Manchus would have feared the killer in him, doing as the Koreans did—beating the crap out of this big, antagonistic gwailo, foreign running dog, trying to make him complacent with frequent personal pain. His lined face documented the pallor of torture, the feral scars of agony. The slide into inert emptiness, a Buddhist absence. For a middle-aged con back in stir, the new brutality reawakened old rages and drew lost regimens from dusty memory. It made his eyes beam red and silent in a dark cell, surveying me, measuring my meaning.
My face had its own dents.
“Tae don hee jaesong hameeneeda, yukkun soryong.” So sorry, major. The guards bowed, backing away. They couldn't lift McCrail. I helped; we dropped him in a concrete chair. They hauled on his chains to crush his testicles and left, their boots respectfully quiet. The steel door clanged shut, the echoes cold and full of dark promises.
We silently surveyed each other. Then he gratingly spoke Korean. He had brushed his teeth and stank of old-man fear. The guards were gone. “I am Captain Jackson Kan. I am a JAGC IG. Who are you?”
He exhaled, looking old. “Ah, hell. Shoulda seen it. Friggin’ Wizard.” He spat. “Shoulda killed me years ago.”
“The Wizard disappeared one of our IGs. I need your help to find him. The Army may owe you, depending on who you are.”
It didn't register. The big boulder head nodded, features crinkling. He muttered both sides of a foul chat centering on my corporeal reality. He blinked; I was still here. He showed big yellow teeth as half-crushed roaches struggled on his body.
“TIG, huh? The hell you are. You look chink army to me. What the hell happened to your face?” Sandpaper on plate glass.
No guards. I popped the threads and removed the overcoat, showing the U.S. blouse with Indian-head patch, French braid fourragère, Presidential Unit Citation and my decorations. I had gotten a Silver Star for the river ambushes, a red, white and blue silk ribbon painted in a child's blood. I had slid them on the four-tier chest-decoration rack for McCrail/Curadess. Otherwise I did not wear the award I had gotten at the Dong Nai. I had suspected that Carlos had put me in for it to confirm my judgment that day.
“I don't speak Korean. The bandages are a cover for silence.”
He spat thickly on the cold floor. The red spit sizzled. He raised snowy brows, white portcullises on an ancient castle. “Cap'n, you're the cat's pajamas. No sir, never seen no Chinese Airborne Ranger IG with a DSC, Silver Star, Bronze Star, Purple Heart. Hell if I don't feel the Lord's grin in a shitty place.”
He giggled. “Damn, you fooled me. Hell, you fooled them! I see it. Big even for an American, but I seen your type. North Chinese. Ni hau ma. Same chink stock that blew me the hell outa my hole and walked me into Manchuland. Damn—an American officer! You found me. With so much Chinese face, they let you in here and gave you a joss stick. Hell, you're probably West Point. Tell me if I'm wrong.”
He let coils of incense undulate under his nose. “That smells good,” saying it like James Brown, stretching the second word with a voice that had given orders above the screams of dying men and the earth-shaking crunch of guns, a voice that made the stink back off.
His voice was a combat NCO's big vulgar fist, the gruff call of a warrior slayer, Irish in manner, black in speech and Army in blood. He had Richard Boone's deep, imperative rasp, spiced with Harlem and Kilkenny and Tennessee-hill-country drawl, full of wry mischief, fattened on other men's blood and busted bones, textured with a history of silent injuries. I put on the overcoat.
“I don't know how much time we have. Tell me who you are.”
“A kick to hear American. Used to practice it in Tangyuan. Don't, you lose it and go chink. Knock the roaches off my back.”
I looked interested, my remaining hairs standing up in the dungeon, my intent blunted by his circus nature. I brushed off the bugs and stitched my coats together with cold fingers. He cursed all insects. “I eat food raw, like a bug.”
“You keep playing games with me, I'll end up having chow with all of you.”
“Tee hee. I'd like that! Patrick Treaty McCrail, sergeant major, U.S. Army, RA5666838, DOB 26 October 1927.”
It was him. I recorded his service number and DOB. The lilt reminded me of Academy days, full of tough, red-faced Irishmen with hard fists and big bellies.
“May I?” He nodded. I huffed on my sunglasses and cleaned them with a handkerchief, put them next to his shackles and pressed his fat, spatulate fingers onto the lenses. “I'm looking for a missing captain. Tall, thin, brown hair.”
McCrail's hooded eyes were gray and deep, red-flecked, lined with yellow fatigue and shaded in anger gone brown. He grunted like a fattened ox, wet, tired, his flanks immense, his slow breathing the bellows of a mammal larger than man, a beast who had lived in Manchuria, in weather colder than this tubercular cell.
“Cap'n, I been in solitary. I don't see crap. No—crap is all I see. No officers here. Just enlisted pukes. Aussies, Turks and Korean political types. Child killers. How long he been gone?”
No Jimmy. I hated to say, “This is the ninth day.”
He tried to point. His face went to crinkles as he guffawed like a monolithic jackass. Once, I sensed, he had laughed for the pleasure of a soft glade. For years, that gift had been denied him. Now he laughed at life's absurdities, because an Asian man let him roar and slobber without bashing out his teeth. He choked on his laughter. He hawked and spat. “Ah, that's rich. Dirty, tight officers. Forgettin’ your men. If you knew how—oh, hell.”
He glowered, stopping himself. “Sir, they gave me the big one—life,” the last word a paragraph. The cackle. He closed gray cat-eyes, licking the cut in his mouth. The joss smoked in retreat from bad smells, roaches scrabbling to reach the stick. Rats scurried in broken sewer lines. Prisoners screamed. Fluids snaked down dark walls. The humid cold was in my bones. I felt like killing bugs.
“McCrail, tell me about your JAGC.”
“That bastard gave evidence to the ROK prosecutors.”
I exhaled. The Wizard had not only sent McCrail here for life; he had convicted him while serving as his defense lawyer.
Reassessing me: “You any good at this legal crap?”
“I'll do all I can for you. Tell me your lawyer's name.”
McCrail leaned his ample form toward me, chains complaining. He motioned. I leaned forward. He smelled of new sweat squeezed from old pores and of long pacing on ammonia-treated concrete. His stomach growled like low thunder in a black summer sky.
“Need to unass this pit, Captain,” he whispered, jackboots on rock. “Monkey the wires and get me out. For ten lousy days. I need to be in Hong Kong.”
Preposterous. “Perry Mason with a crowbar couldn't get you there.”
Chains clanked. He leaned back. “Then figure it out.”
I had no clue how to sneak a chained three-hundred-pound foreign prisoner out of maximum security without using military force. I had a Richelieu letter, but down here it was toil
et paper with black print. I could start a habeas today, but here, it would move with the speed of the dead.
Footfalls. A guard. I crouched, faking a quick, hard body blow to McCrail's ribs. He recoiled and the guard left laughing.
I asked why his JAGC had cheated him into prison.
Ten seconds had passed and I hadn't busted him out. “Well, Captain, maybe he wasn't as good as you.”
“Tell me about the train. Give me something I can work on.”
“Drop it. I'm dead meat on that damned train. Got me on film and wired for sound.” The big white head, the hard, pained eyes.
“Knocked out four stinkin’ cameras. Found one screwed into main power. If I cut it, I couldn't play the program. Pried out the film canister. Like openin’ a crab.” He paused, thinking.
“What the hell. I was on the road to an Article 32 hearing for recruiting fraud and black-marketing.” An Army grand jury investigation.
“That's a lot of badness for a sergeant major.”
He sniffed. “Did it. Had me a good plan. Broke the schemes down to my lawyer—Fast Freddy C. LeBlanc.”
Got him. I wrote, “McCrail's JAGC: Fast Freddy C. LeBlanc, 1125 hours, 17 Jan 74, Naktong, Suwon ROK.”
“Gave Freddy the rail center film. Quick-like, com-sa— DA—has crime scene photos. Freddy says, ‘Sign papers.’ I read Hangul; the damn thing was a confession. Tore that sucker up, but the court gets it anyway. My crimes pull thirty years with a confession—and I get life. They did me good, sir, without no Vaseline or hand towel, later.
“I wrote the CG, Congress, President Lyndon B. Johnson. Bolo. All I get is a jackcrap JAGC with the clap.”
“Major Thomas Nagol, a thin syphilitic?”
His eyes burned. An iron voice, cold as ice. “Him, He kicks my green butt out of Suwon and clangs me in the Naktong Forget-It Hole. Me, a nut for high ground and clean air, bein’ stuck down here. Teach me to speak out. My mail don't go out. Don't get food. I scarf it raw when it comes. I write the UN commander, bulls beat me with sticks.” He puckered on a gum hole and shrugged. Chains clinked. “I seen worse.
