What Ernie was hoping for, I wasn’t quite sure.
We crept ever closer to the mashed-down grass. Now we could hear heavy breathing. Ernie turned, looked at me, and in the moonlight I could see his grin. He raised three fingers and started counting down: One, two, three.
Ernie rose to his feet and burst into the clearing.
I expected the women to scream but they didn’t. They were seasoned pros. But they did scoot back from their squatting positions, covering their mouths with their hands, and stared at us in wide-eyed astonishment. There were three of them, all bundled in thick jackets and mittens and wool scarves, as if expecting to be out in this cold weather for many hours. In front of them, on a blanket spread atop crumpled grass, lay a GI. All I could see of him was the back of his field jacket and his green fatigue trousers. Sticking out on either side of him were two small hands and two small feet. I noticed that the feet were incongruously shod with knitted wool socks.
Ernie grabbed the GI by the scruff of his neck and brutally jerked him backwards.
“What the…?”
From nowhere, Ernie’s. 45 glistened in the moonlight, the tip of the oil-slick barrel pointing straight up into the GI’s nostril. He was a black man, or at least partly black. Very light-skinned and slightly chubby around the jowls.
“Move and I’ll blow your dick off,” Ernie said.
The GI started cussing. The girl beneath him squealed and kicked her way back into the grass. Of the three women sitting across from us, two of them were young and one was old. Very old. I spoke to her in Korean, not bothering to use honorifics for the elderly.
“Weikurei yogi-ei?” What the hell are you doing here?
She answered in Korean, her withered hand pressed against her chest, and told me that Ernie and I had given her quite a start. I told her to shut up, while Ernie let the GI pull up his fatigue pants. I saw by the tag on his field jacket that his name was Taggard. He wasn’t wearing any rank insignia. That meant that he was a private E- nothing. Busted down to the lowest possible military rank.
“Court-martial time,” Ernie told Taggard. “Article Fifteen at least. You know you’re not supposed to be out here. What if there’s a fire mission? And the women out here are off limits. They probably don’t even have VD cards.”
Taggard cussed a little more, trying to regain some of the dignity he’d lost.
Ernie had referred to these prostitutes as women but they were, in fact, only girls. Fifteen or sixteen years old, I estimated. One still sported the Buster Brown haircut that middle-school girls in Korea are required to wear. Probably from poor families, sold to this old witch sitting here who was pretending to act so shocked at the intrusion.
Did the Korean National Police in Uichon know about this operation? Certainly, they did. A group of teenage girls living with an old crone, with no visible means of support? The KNPs knew. Worse, they were probably receiving a cut of the action.
“All right, Taggard,” Ernie said. “That’s your name, isn’t it? Unless you borrowed somebody else’s field jacket. No. Couldn’t be. Nobody else in the unit could be that fat.”
Taggard’s cheeks bulged with anger. Ernie held the. 45 aimed at his face, although I knew the charging handle hadn’t been pulled back. Ernie couldn’t have shot Taggard if he’d wanted to. Fortunately, Taggard didn’t know that.
“I’m going to ask you some questions, Private Taggard,” Ernie said. “After each one you’re going to give me an answer. Understand? You’re not going to give me any bullshit or any excuses about why you don’t know. You’re just going to give me an answer. Got that?”
When Taggard didn’t reply, Ernie clanged back the charging handle of the. 45, pressed it hard up against Taggard’s nose, and repeated the question, pronouncing each word slowly.
“Do you understand that?”
Reluctantly, Taggard nodded. Beads of perspiration broke out on his forehead.
I considered jumping on Ernie, wrestling the. 45 away from him. But that might cause the gun to go off. Would he really shoot Taggard? From the look on Ernie’s face, I couldn’t be sure. He was enraged. In Inchon, when we gazed at the wounded Han Ok-hi in her oxygen tent, and at the Yellow House, when we examined the cigarette burns along Mi-ja’s arm, and then, in Songtan, when we saw the blood exsanguinated from the body of Jo Kyong-ah, Ernie had acted as if he were just a cop doing a job. No emotion showed on his face. But now his face was a mask of rage. He’d caught someone in the act of committing a crime: having sex for pay with an underage girl. What worried me most was that he was going to take all his rage and frustration out on a miscreant GI named Taggard. Maybe Taggard deserved to have his ass kicked. He probably even deserved time in the stockade, but he didn’t deserve to be shot dead.
“Boltworks,” Ernie said. “Rodney, K., Private First Class. Talk!”
“Asshole,” Taggard said.
“Explain!”
“He was an asshole, that’s all. Always messing with people. When he lost his ration control privileges, he started pestering everybody else-Let me use your ration card for this; let me use it for that. He beat up a few of the wimpy dudes in the battery and made them buy some shit out of the PX for him, but he knew better than to mess with me.”
“I’ll bet,” Ernie said. “How long has he been gone?”
“Ask mama-san. She knows.”
The old woman and her girls slid back even further into the grass. I told her in Korean to stay right where she was.
“What do you mean?” Ernie asked Taggard.
“Bolt was the first one out here.”
“Bolt?”
“Yeah. That’s what we called Boltworks. Every time we were in the field, he’d find mama-san and her girls. Had a nose for pussy until he smelled the wrong kind.”
Ernie shoved the tip of the. 45 back toward his nose. “Go on,” he said.
On the other side of the wall of grass, I noticed some movement of lights. Probably just the perimeter guards.
“Why you want me to tell you?” Taggard said. “Ask mama-san.”
“I’m asking you,” Ernie replied.
Taggard sighed. A gentleman, hugely inconvenienced.
“Boltworks came out here for one particular girl.”
“Pretty?”
“Better than these pug-nosed bitches. Boltworks was greedy. Kept her all to himself, alone, way over there in the grass all night.”
Taggard pointed vaguely into the distance.
“Didn’t Boltworks have guard duty?”
“He didn’t mess with that shit. Told somebody else to pull it for him.”
“Paid them?”
“Hell no. Boltworks was crazy. Guys’d pull his guard duty just so he wouldn’t mess with them. Not me though.
I wasn’t afraid of him.”
“Tell me about the girl.”
“He used to take her every time we came out to Nightmare Range. Give mama-san here some tambay or something.” Cigarettes. “And then one night we heard a lot of noise. Not screaming or crying or anything like that, but fighting. A couple of the other guys went over, and they found the girl bloodied up. She was too pretty, almost blonde, you know. She crazy though. Still smiling. That big smile of hers she always had no matter what.”
I felt dizzy for a moment. The smiling woman, the one who’d sat at a table with me in the King Club in Itaewon, the woman who’d drugged me, the woman who’d escorted the dark GI onto the train at Inchon Station- that’s who he was talking about.
“So what happened to Boltworks?” Ernie asked.
