Ernie stepped on the gas, and in less than two hours we’d reached the city of Waegwan. A few minutes after that, we were pulling up to the front gate of the huge logistics storage area known as Camp Carroll.
“Ernie!” Marnie screeched.
She ran toward him, arms upraised, and grabbed him in a bear hug around his waist.
“Settle down, girl,” Ernie said. She tried to lift him but couldn’t, so he lifted her instead and carried her over to a straight-backed chair and sat her down. “Sit!” he said. “And behave yourself.”
Marnie stared up at him, her cowgirl hat tilted back and pinned to her blonde locks. “You can’t believe what we’ve been through since you and George walked out on us.” Then she pouted. “You didn’t even say good- bye.”
“Yes, I did,” Ernie replied.
“Not a real good-bye.” She smiled impishly and leaped back to her feet, the heels of her cowboy boots stomping on the wooden stage.
We were in the Camp Carroll NCO Club. The instruments were set up and Marnie and the rest of the girls were ready to start their performance. However, there was still no audience. The doors had been kept locked, by order of the base commander, because he didn’t want his troops leaving work early to claim a seat near the stage. Instead, he’d instructed the club manager to set up reserved seating by unit. The tables were pushed together in various-sized clumps, and in the center of each group of tables sat a unit banner or insignia. The Headquarters Company’s table was the largest, and the full-bird insignia of the base commander sat right at the head of the table, facing center stage. Rank has its privileges.
I grabbed a cup of coffee out of the kitchen. The Korean cooks studied me, some of them nodding, as did the waitresses, who were folding silverware into napkins. I greeted them all in Korean and they nodded and greeted me back. I carried an extra cup of coffee back to the stage for Ernie.
“Nothing for me?” Marnie pouted.
“You have to start work in a minute,” Ernie told her.
I sat down in a straight-backed chair near Marnie and asked her about these incidents that had been happening. The musicians of the Country Western All Star Review kept tuning their instruments.
“It’s been awful,” she said. “Just horrid. We never have any privacy and our equipment keeps disappearing, and then, of all things, Shelly has her underwear stolen. And those MPs they assigned to help us, dumb as bricks.”
Marnie’s face became serious. She lost her coquettishness and suddenly I could see the intelligent woman beneath the facade of gaiety: the woman who’d organized an all-female country-western band; the woman who’d landed a contract with the USO to travel overseas to the Republic of Korea; the woman who was scouring the world looking for the father of her child.
“But there’s something more important,” she said, lowering her voice. “Something I really need your help on.”
She reached out and touched Ernie with her left hand and grabbed my hand with her right.
“I haven’t told you everything,” she said.
“Somehow I thought not,” Ernie replied.
She pouted at him, the scamp, for just a second, and then she returned to her serious demeanor. She squeezed my hand.
“Casey’s father is not behind on his child support.”
“Casey?” Ernie asked. “Who’s Casey?”
“My daughter,” Marnie told him. “The one who’s with my mom right now.”
“So Casey’s father,” Ernie said, “is this guy you’re looking for. This Freddy Ray.”
“Yes. Captain Frederick Raymond Embry.”
She turned to me, as if hoping I’d jot the name down in my notebook. I didn’t.
“So if he’s not behind on his child support,” I asked, “why are you looking for him?”
“He never sees his daughter,” she said. “That’s not right. Children need their daddy, even if he’s a louse who walked out on us.”
“Sounds like you’re still carrying a torch for him,” Ernie said.
“No way. Not after what he did to me. You’ve already seen it,” she told Ernie. “He hasn’t.”
She stood up and pulled her silk cowgirl blouse out from beneath the leather belt of her tight blue jeans. Then she raised the blouse all the way up to her brassiere hook and turned to show me her back. It was a vicious scar, running from the left side of her rib cage to the center of her spine. She lowered her blouse, tucked it back in, and turned to face me.
“Thirteen stitches,” she said. “And if I hadn’t fought back, Freddy Ray would’ve killed me. I know he’s supposed to be an officer and a gentleman but, believe me, he’s no gentleman.”
“When this happened,” I said, pointing toward her back, “didn’t you file a complaint?”
“Of course I did. The cops arrested him and there was a trial, but he said that during the altercation I had attacked him, and when he’d pushed me away I’d tripped and fallen, and that’s how the wound had occurred.”
“Did you attack him?” I asked.
Marnie looked away. “Yes. I did.”
“So in Texas, him being an officer and a gentleman and you being partially responsible, they let him go.”
Marnie shook her head at the memory. “The judge said that since he was going to be serving his country overseas and since he’d ‘suffered enough,’ all charges would be dropped.”
“Okay,” Ernie said. “So Freddy Ray is an asshole. So why are you here? Do you just want to start up again?”
“No, it’s not about me. It’s about Casey.” She stared first at Ernie and then at me. “He says he hasn’t been seeing her because he doesn’t believe that she’s really his daughter.” She raised a finger and pointed it at Ernie’s nose. “And before you ask, the answer is none of your business. Whether Casey is Freddy Ray’s daughter or somebody else’s doesn’t make her any less precious to me.”
Ernie sat down and let the silence grow for a while. Finally he raised both his hands in supplication and said, “Okay. I understand. You want to confront Freddy Ray and persuade him to do the right thing by his daughter. Okay, fine. But what do you want us to do about it?”
“I want you to be there when I talk to him.”
“So you won’t get hurt,” I said.
“You got it,” she replied. “And I want you to set up the meeting.”
“Us?” Ernie asked.
She caressed his shoulder. “It would be so thoughtful of you.”
Ernie and I looked at each other. A commotion was starting at the front of the club. The door had been opened and the troops were flooding in. Some of them wore cowboy hats along with their fatigue uniforms, a dispensation that had been specially granted-today only-by the post commander. They started hooting as soon as they saw the female musicians on the stage.
Marnie jumped up, ordering the curtains to be closed, and we, along with all the girls of the Country Western All Star Review, scurried back into the wings. Marnie pulled me aside.
“You’re the only one who can help,” she said. “Your friend, that Staff Sergeant Riley in Seoul, he helped me find out where Freddy Ray is stationed. It’s Camp Henry, the place where we play tomorrow night. I just want you to find him for me so I can talk to him before the show.”
Before I could answer, she hugged me and strode out on stage.
On her count, the Country Western All Star Review started up a hot number. The curtains were pulled open and the entire NCO Club ballroom, jam-packed with G.I. s, went mad with joy.
9
After midnight, the highway leading south toward Pusan seemed like the Land of the Dead. Nothing moves in Korea during the midnight-to-four curfew. Even down here, some 200 miles from the Demilitarized Zone, the ROK Army is worried about North Korean infiltrators; worried that they could come in by sea to blow up power plants
