G.I. Bones

by Martin Limon

  An old woman wearing a floor-length dress and heavily made up, scurried out from the back room. She waved her open palm from side to side and said, “G.I. no! No can do! Bali kara!” Go away.

  Ernie stepped in front of her and turned his side to the old woman to block her way. She plowed into him, grabbed his coat, and kept shouting, “G.I. no! G.I. no!”

  Businessmen from various booths around the room were standing up now, murmuring curse words that had something to do with “base foreign louts.”

  The old woman jerked on Ernie’s coat and he jerked back and then shoved her. He miscalculated a tad. The heavily painted old crone reeled back and crashed into a cart that held a bucket full of ice and a half-full bottle of Johnny Walker Black. The woman and the cart and the ice and the booze all crashed to the carpeted floor.

  Kisaeng screamed. The Korean men were up now, surrounding Ernie and me, some of them pointing and shouting, others being held back by their brethren.

  Ernie held his palm out and said, “Back off!”

  Jessica Tidwell pushed through the crowd. Some of the Korean men made way for her. She stepped in front of me, reached into her purse, and whipped out a bayonet. As one, the crowd gasped at the gleaming metal blade and everyone took a half step back.

  Koreans argue in public often—they aren’t called the Irish of the Orient for nothing—but they seldom get violent. Everyone shoves and pushes and grabs coats but only occasionally does the altercation devolve into fisticuffs, and virtually never into assaults involving a weapon as deadly as a sharpened bayonet.

  Still a half-an-arm’s length away, Jessica Tidwell pointed the tip of the blade at my throat.

  “I ought to cut you,” she said.

  She might try but she wouldn’t make it. Not only was I ready to deflect her lunge but Ernie had turned his back on the stunned Koreans and stood less than a step away. The Korean customers and female hostesses sat immobile, barely breathing, watching a tableau involving the exotic rituals of three long-nosed foreign barbarians.

  “You shot Paco!” Jessica shouted.

  I stared at her, not bothering to offer a defense. She’d been there. She’d seen what happened. She knew that Paco Bernal had attacked Ernie with the very bayonet she now held in her hand. She knew that I had no choice but to shoot. We stood like that for what seemed like a long while but was, in reality, probably only a few seconds; she staring directly into my eyes, me staring back.

  Finally, she twisted the bayonet with her narrow fingers until the handle was pointing toward me. “Here,” she said. Ernie snatched it out of her hand.

  The Koreans surrounding us let out a sigh of relief. The stepped back even further—not so far that they couldn’t observe, but far enough so they wouldn’t be hurt by the crazy foreigners.

  Jessica swept red bangs from her forehead. “So now you have the bayonet,” she said. “The ‘assault weapon’ I guess you’d call it. So why don’t you get out of here and leave me alone?”

  “No way,” Ernie said.

  Jessica screamed. “What do you want from me?”

  “You’re coming with us,” Ernie said.

  “The hell I am.” Jessica’s green eyes flashed in the dim light and she rummaged back in her leather purse. I almost expected her to pull out a pistol this time but instead a laminated card emerged. She flipped it at Ernie. He grabbed it in midair.

  He twisted the card toward the light, read it, and then handed it to me.

  “What of it,” Ernie said. “We’ve seen it before. Your dependent ID card.”

  I studied the card. The same military dependent identification we’d seen when we first found the sleeping Jessica Tidwell in Corporal Paco Bernal’s room in the barracks at 21 T Car.

  “Check the date of birth,” she told me.

  I did. Then I did the math.

  “That’s right, Einstein,” she said. “I’m eighteen years old now. No longer a minor.” She grinned a lascivious grin. “You can’t touch me.”

  She was right. Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, once a military dependent turned eighteen years old we could no longer take her into custody and turn her over to her parents. Not legally.

  “Eighth Army doesn’t give a shit about that legal crap,” Ernie said.

  “My ass,” Jessica replied. “I’ll hire a civilian lawyer and burn both of you and sue the freaking fatigues off the provost marshal and the commanding general of Eighth Army if I have to.”

  Jessica Tidwell grew up as an army brat. She knew all the ins and outs of how to strike terror into the heart of a military bureaucrat. And she was right. She was no longer a minor. Ernie and I couldn’t take her into custody.

  I handed the ID card back to her.

  “So what do you plan to do, Jessica?” I asked. “Work here, lighting cigarettes and pouring scotch, for the rest of your life?”

  I glanced around at the half-drunk businessmen and the startled kisaeng. Mouths hung open, some of them twisted in sneers of disgust. But one thing they all had in common is that they were all tremendously interested in what we had to say and they were all straining to understand our English.

  “No way I’m going to stay here,” Jessica replied. “Not hardly. Paco’s being transferred to Tripler Army Medical in Honolulu. I’m just working until then so we’ll have some cash to start out on.”

  “You’re following him to Hawaii?”

  “What did you expect?”

  I’m not sure what I expected. But it was clear that from here on out that Jessica Tidwell, adult, would make her own decisions.

  “You’ll say goodbye to your mother,” I said.

  “Her, yes. But not to my dad.”

  I wanted to ask her why not but thought better of it. That was her decision. Not my business.

  “Your mom‘s worried sick about you,” I said. “We’re going to tell her where you are.”

  “Just don’t bring her down here.”

  “That’s up to her. Not us.”

  “I’m not worried about that. She won’t come down here without an escort. Even in the States, she’s afraid to leave the compound by herself.”

  “All right then,” I said, “It’s settled. You’re going to watch out for yourself from now on. Be careful.”

  “I will.” She turned to Ernie. “Sorry for kneeing you in the balls.”

  “Don’t mention it,” Ernie replied.

  19

  Sergeant First Class Quinton “Q” Hilliard looked great in his papa-san outfit. His silk vest was fire engine red and his pantaloons were sky blue. He also wore a jade pendant around his neck and his pipe was made of hand-carved bamboo.

  Ernie shook Hilliard’s hand in congratulations and so did I and then we bowed to the bride. Miss Kwon wore a bright red traditional chima-chogori dress with yellow and green stripes on the arms. A silver tiara sat atop her intricately braided black hair. She bowed back to us and we wished her every happiness. A lot of soul brothers were enjoying themselves with the free-flowing soju, Korean rice liquor, and Ernie mixed with them easily, shaking hands and laughing, patting them on the back.

  That was Ernie. He’d fight you or love you with equal alacrity. I’m not sure he saw a difference between the two.

  Miss Kwon confided to me that at first she’d seen Hilliard’s pursuit of her as being pressure that was more than she could bear. But later, she realized that he was going as far as he did, and using every power at his disposal—ethical or not—because he truly cared for her. Yes, he was over ten years older than her and yes, he was a foreigner but Miss Kwon’s ancestors were far away in North Korea behind a bamboo curtain that couldn’t be breached and her parents were dead and her foster family of butchers saw her only as a source of income. She was alone in this world. And besides, she told me in Korean, she thought Hilliard was kiowo-yo, cute. I wasn’t sure I agreed with that part but the more I got to know him, the more I realized that he was fundamentally a decent guy.

  I wandered over to the table with th
e soju and poured myself a shot. So far, Miss Kwon’s name hadn’t come up in Captain Kim’s murder investigation. I don’t think he was worried about who had murdered Two Bellies; he was concentrating on the political hot potato of the twenty-year-old murder of Moretti. In the States, some hotshot reporter would be interviewing the relatives of the people who had been murdered in the Itaewon Massacre, printing stories about them crying for the blood of Jimmy Pak and Snake and the other surviving Seven Dragons. But in Korea, there was no such publicity. Under the Pak Chung-hee regime, the press was controlled. And with millions of dollars in United States military and economic aide flowing into the coffers of the government, President Pak stepped on stories concerning a murdered American G.I. He wanted nothing to hurt relations between South Korea and its most important international ally.

  Captain Kim was probably feeling the pressure too. My guess was that he wouldn’t come looking for the weapon that had been used to murder Two Bellies and, even if he caught wind of Miss Kwon’s involvement, once he realized she was marrying a G.I. and moving forever to the States, he’d be relieved.

  I’d been pondering whether to turn her in. Two Bellies might’ve been a washed-up prostitute but she was a human being, a child of god just like the rest of us. Murdering her wasn’t right. Still, I’d promised Miss Kwon that her secret would be safe with me. I managed to ease my conscience somewhat by telling myself that the case didn’t fall under my jurisdiction—and it didn’t. But mainly I calmed myself during restless nights by remembering Miss Kwon standing on the ledge near the roof of the King Club, staring at the fall below her—at her own death. Miss Kwon would have to live with what she’d done to Two Bellies. And Hilliard, now that he was her husband, would have to help her get through it.

  I poured myself another shot of soju.

  Some soul sister—Private Wallings, the one who’d blasted us at the EEO office—had dragged Ernie out on the dance floor and he was dancing as if he hadn’t a care in the world. I searched the faces of the other guests, those on the dance floor and those off of it, hoping that Doc Yong would be among them. But, of course, she wasn’t.

  After a couple of more shots, Hilliard stepped over to the table and took me aside, leading me out into the open foyer. He placed his hand on my shoulder.

  “What about Doc Yong?” he asked me. “How is she doing up there?”

  “I can’t be sure,” I said. “Not good according to MI.”

  “MI,” Hilliard said. “What the hell does Military Intelligence know?”

  Doc Yong had asked me to hold off telling the Korean National Police until she and her friends—the two men and the three women—could make arrangements to flee the country. They couldn’t obtain a passport—those were husbanded carefully by Pak Chung-hee’s military regime—but she could obtain a fishing boat.

  I tried to talk her out of it.

  She took me by the hand and stared into my eyes.

  “My mother was an activist for labor unions,” she said. “So was my father. In the eyes of the people running South Korea at that time, joining a union was the same as being a Communist. The more well known my father became, the more danger he was in. He was assassinated by the Syngman Rhee regime. The leaders of all unions and the leaders of the Workers’ Party, the ones who survived, fled north. But they never forgot me. A North Korean agent operating here in the south contacted the Buddhist nuns and gave them enough money to send me to school. It was because of him that I was able to become a doctor. It was because of him that I am now able to help my people. And it is to him, and the Communist Workers’ Party of the north, that I owe my allegiance”

  “But you can’t go up there,” I said, tightening my grip on her hands.

  “My ancestors are in North Korea,” she told me. “I’m going to take the photograph of my mother and return to our home village of Simsok-ni. There I can pray at our ancestral burial mounds.”

  “But the North Koreans will arrest you,” I said. “In their minds, you’ve been tainted by living down here. The commissars will throw you in a prison camp.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. They need doctors. Anyway if I stay here, I spend the rest of my life in the monkey house.”

  “I won’t tell anyone. Neither will Ernie.”

  “Someday Captain Kim will find out.”

  She was right. Captain Kim was a smart man and a good cop. And now that the case had become public, and both the Korean and the U.S. government were demanding justice, Captain Kim was bound to provide it. Eventually. Still, I tried to give Doc Yong some reason to stay.

  “South Korean prisons,” I said, “beat the hell out of North Korean prisons.”

  She looked at me with that look again, as if to say I wasn’t too smart.

  We spent our last night together. I couldn’t sleep. Before dawn I woke her and promised her again that I would tell no one what I knew and that I would do everything to make sure that she was never punished for her crimes.

  She patted me on the cheek and told me to go back to sleep.

  The next morning, I saw Doctor Yong In-ja and her five compatriots off from a rickety wooden pier on a wharf at Kangnam Island. They were bundled warmly against the cold air and wore rain slickers to keep dry. She squeezed my hand as she climbed down into the skiff. The women unfurled a sail and the two men started heaving at the oars. They pulled away from the pier, confident that in the heavy fog they’d be able to slip past the South Korean coastal patrols and make their way into North Korean waters.

  She waved to me one last time. As I waved back, she pointed at her belly, cupping it tenderly with splayed fingers as if embracing something precious. Then she smiled.

  I watched helplessly as the smooth complexion of her face was enveloped by the cold morning mist.