skilled in tae kwon do, the indigenous Korean form of karate, meaning “the path of kicking and punching.” Some young men had turned themselves into awesome physical machines designed to do just that: kick and punch.
Jimmy smiled even more broadly and opened his arms as if to hug me.
“Geogi,” he said. “My friend. How are you?”
“OK, Jimmy.” I didn’t step forward into his embrace.
He lowered his arms but his smile never faltered.
“We must talk,” he said.
“I thought you wanted to talk to me at the UN Club.”
“Right here is good, too.”
Jimmy Pak’s smile faded and I saw an expression I’d never seen on his face before: a frown. It made him look like a different man, a very frightening man.
“Mori Di,” he said. “You uncovered his bones. This cause much trouble in Itaewon.”
The two bodyguards were starting to step slightly away from Jimmy, as if to improve their angle of attack.
“What do you want, Jimmy?” I said.
“It’s not me,” Jimmy said. “It’s Snake. He wants to talk to you.”
“And I want to talk to him,” I said.
“Good. We go now.”
“Not now,” I said. “I’m busy.” I wasn’t happy with these conditions. No one, except Miss Kwon, would know my whereabouts. And she would know that I’d talked to Jimmy Pak, but not about Snake. “Give me a time and place.”
“The time is now,” Jimmy said. “And we’ll show you the place.”
“No. Make an appointment.”
I started to walk away. The two men scurried forward. I turned and reached inside my jacket, touching the hilt of my. 45, letting my jacket fall open. They stopped.
“If Snake wants to talk, all he has to do is give me a time and place,” I said.
Once again, Jimmy Pak smiled.
“You’re right, Geogi. I apologize. We’re just so anxious because so many things have been going wrong. How about tonight, at midnight?”
“Where?”
“My club.”
I thought about it. Then I said, “I’ll be there.”
And I’d notify Ernie and the desk sergeant at the Yongsan MP Station as to where I’d be and who I’d be talking to. I turned and walked down the alley. Jimmy’s two bodyguards went the other way. I heard them conferring with their boss as their voices faded.
I was about to step out of the narrow lane into the light of the Itaewon main drag when I saw Miss Kwon, standing in an alley, a worried expression on her face. I stopped, and was about to speak to her when something heavy cracked the back of my skull.
It didn’t hurt at that moment; it would later. The world started to spin, lights flashed, brightly at first, and then, as if someone was turning them off one by one, they began to fade. I felt my knees melting, and then a feeling like flying and then the world, spinning around, faded into darkness. Nothing but darkness. Complete and total.
15
When I was a kid in East L.A., schoolyard fights were a regular occurrence. But it wasn’t those fights I was afraid of. Invariably, even when we became teenagers, they would be broken up by someone in authority. A teacher or, in the case of full-fledged melees, by a group of male gym teachers wielding wooden paddles. So, in general, on school grounds, you were safe.
It was between home and school that things were dicey. Not so much on the way to school in the mornings. Mexican vatos and other gang members tend not be early risers. But by the time school let out, two or three in the afternoon, they were up, had already taken their first jolt of nicotine or uppers; they were ready to start their day’s work, tormenting people weaker than they. Nobody had any plans for protecting children on their way home. From the edge of the schoolyard to the front door of your apartment or your house or your trailer, the good kids were like a migrating herd of caribou, fair game for whatever pack of predators happened to be prowling.
We scurried forward, our heads down, hoping that the punks wouldn’t pick us out of the crowd but it was never long, it seemed, before somebody picked me. I always dealt with it somehow, by fighting, by taking my lumps, and occasionally by running. But it was the smaller kids who bothered me. The ones who cried their eyes out after they’d been punched for no reason or had their glasses stomped or whose prized slide rule had been ripped out of their book bag and snapped in two. I didn’t like seeing these things. They hurt me and I found it impossible to look away. It was, in many ways, worse than being tormented myself. Somehow, when watching one of these torture sessions, I’d find a way to screw up my courage and I’d tell the bad guys to leave the kid alone.
Leave the kid alone. That’s all I’d said. But the vatos were astounded. You would’ve thought I’d defiled the holy sepulcher. The punks in the gangs considered it their sacred right to pick on kids weaker than themselves and not to countenance interference. When I rudely interrupted, all their wrath was turned on me. It got to the point that I didn’t mind. The bumps and bruises and occasional kicks in the ribs I took were not as painful as watching a helpless kid being molested by a pack of bullies. And then a few boys started sticking close to me and then the girls. And after a while we were a pack that moved together, seeking safety as we approached the homes of our various members. And one by one each child would peel off and run pell-mell to the front door of an apartment or trailer and then wave goodbye as the rest of us continued to move toward home. I felt good about doing this. About protecting the other kids. Until one day when the vatos caught me alone.
I was hospitalized. And when the cop from juvenile hall asked me who’d done this to me, I told him I’d fallen down a flight of steps. He spat in disgust, considering me a coward. But I wasn’t a coward, only a realist. There was nothing he could do to protect me. He’d never be there for our midafternoon odysseys and we kids, like all people in the end, were on our own.
A report was made and a few days after my release from the hospital, the Supervisors of the County of Los Angeles moved me to another foster home. I don’t know what happened to my flock. Although I thought of them often, I never saw them again.
Someone had tied me to a gurney. Leather straps held my arms and legs securely against a white linen sheet. My shirt had been taken off but my pants were still on and I could feel my wallet behind my butt and my keys and loose change in my front pocket. So I hadn’t been robbed.
The light seemed too bright but I opened my eyes anyway. And then shut them, allowing my pupils to accommodate themselves to the bright bulb focused on me like the eye of a malevolent dragon. Somebody turned the bulb away. I chanced a peek. Gazing down at me, smiling, was the narrow face of the dark-complexioned Korean man known as Snake.
“You fight too much,” he said.
“Let me up,” I said.
“You need rest.”
“I need to pop you in the jaw.”
Snake turned back and said something to the men standing behind him. They laughed. Must’ve been about a half dozen of them. But what Snake said had been spoken too rapidly for me to understand.
Snake aimed the light back to my face. “Somebody kill Water Doggy,” he said.
I squeezed my eyes shut.
“And before that,” Snake continued, “somebody kill Horsehead.”
