home. Mudang dance, sing, drink mokkolli.” Rice beer. “Help Jill find Un-suk-i. No problem. Mudang show Jill how to do.”
It took me a moment to puzzle out exactly what she was saying. Then it became clear. The sorceress would teach Corporal Jill Matthewson how to travel to the land of the dead, commune there with spirits, find Chon Un-suk, and convince the wandering ghost of Chon Un-suk to return with her to the home of her parents.
“Sort of like TDY,” Ernie whispered. The military acronym for traveling on temporary duty away from your home compound.
Excited now by the idea, Madame Chon brushed her hair back and scooted across the lacquered wooden floor until she sat cross-legged directly in front of me. Then she reached out and grabbed both my hands in her cold grip.
“You find Jill,” she said. “You find, bring back here.”
She wouldn’t let go of my hands until I promised to bring Jill Matthewson back for an interview with the mudang. Then Madame Chon slid across the floor to her left, grabbed Ernie’s hands, and made him promise the same thing.
After we’d both promised, she told me what she could about the demonstrations held outside the Camp Casey main gate. About how many people had participated. About the anger directed at the 2nd Infantry Division. And, more gruesomely, what the Korean National Police had done to break up the demonstration. And what they’d done to the demonstrators they’d managed to catch. It wasn’t a pretty picture. But Madame Chon recited it all as if she were revealing her family recipe for winter kimchee.
So far, Ernie and I’d managed to gather more information about Corporal Jill Matthewson than the 2nd ID had during their entire investigation. Why? Maybe they’d been sloppy. Or maybe they hadn’t actually wanted to gather information on her disappearance. Maybe. But my theory was that they were unable-or unwilling-to gather information from Koreans. There’s an arrogance that infects Americans in Korea and it often transcends their common sense. They begin to believe that only people who speak English can be trusted, that any American who believes otherwise is simply naive. Why exactly they believe this is beyond me, but they do. Also, it’s laziness. They conduct their investigations amongst Americans, usually on compound, and that’s it.
I didn’t have much time to figure out why 2nd ID had conducted such a miserable investigation. Something more pressing was occupying my mind: finding Jill Matthewson. And learning what, if anything, the death of Private Marvin Z. Druwood had to do with Jill’s disappearance. What I could be sure of was that someone working for the Division PMO, or the Division provost marshal himself, had lied. I’d seen the evidence with my own eyes. Druwood’s corpse revealed that he’d cracked his skull on cement, but there was no cement near the obstacle course tower.
And now I had another burden. Not only was it my duty to find Jill Matthewson-and report back to her mother in Terre Haute, Indiana-but I also had to worry about the spirit of Chon Un-suk wandering through eternity as a hungry ghost.
I didn’t believe in hungry ghosts; Ernie didn’t believe in hungry ghosts. But Chon Un-suk’s mother did believe in hungry ghosts. And I’d promised to find Jill Matthewson so she could convince a hungry ghost to stop its wandering.
An odd promise, I’ll admit. But like any promise I’d ever made, I was determined to keep it.
5
After leaving the Chon residence, Ernie and I wandered aimlessly through the narrow pedestrian lanes of the western edge of Tongduchon. Men on bicycles piled high with layered shelves of dubu-Korean tofu-jangled their bells and shouted for people to make way. Old women pushed carts laden with glimmering green cabbages through crowds of pedestrians; young women carried infants strapped to their backs; toddlers wearing heavy sweaters but no pants gazed up at us and peed innocently by the edge of the road.
After a few minutes, Ernie and I reached a twenty-foot-wide cement bridge that stretched across the East Bean River. A narrow trickle of water ran below down the center of a broad, muddy riverbed. The backs of homes and apartment buildings lined either bank of the Tongdu River: kimchee jars on balconies; laundry hanging from wire lines fluttering in the morning breeze; an occasional housewife leaning out a window to toss the contents of a porcelain pee pot onto the muddy banks below. A few dozen yards beyond the bridge, back in the city proper, a large wooden archway announced the entrance to TONGDUCHON SICHANG. The East Bean River City Market.
Ernie and I entered. A canvas roof held in place by twenty-foot-high bamboo poles sheltered acres of produce stands. Behind the piled vegetables, women in white bandannas waved their arms and shouted at customers. Housewives with plastic baskets hooked over their elbows browsed along the lanes, seemingly ignoring the chanting vendors. Warm air reeking of green onions and garlic and Napa cabbage freshly plucked from verdant earth suffused the entire market.
Ernie breathed deeply and a broad grin spread across his face. We both felt it. The tactile caress of human life, unsullied by advertising and corporate greed. This is what our lives had once been on this planet. What they should be now. Everywhere.
We wound our way past the produce until we reached walls of shimmering glass tanks holding wriggling mackerel, eels, and octopi. Beyond the tanks a cloud of dust advertised the poultry, flapping smelly wings and cackling, within handmade wooden crates. Finally, like an oasis of calm, the dry goods. Hand-embroidered silk comforters, leather gloves, umbrellas, plump cotton-covered cushions, and then the porcelain: china dolls; effigies of Kumbokju, the chubby god of abundance; pee pots; tea cups with no handles; and tiny drinking glasses made for jolting back shots of soju, the fierce Korean rice liquor.
At last, our search was rewarded. We found what we were looking for. Noodle stands. Billowing steam announced their environs and Ernie and I found a tall, round, rickety table made of splintered wood and shouted our order to an elderly proprietress: “Ramyon, tugei”. Spicy noodles, two.
The other customers were all Koreans and they studiously ignored the two Miguks in their midst. They inhaled noodles or chatted with their neighbors in rapid sentences or gazed intently at books, studying for the exam that always seemed to be looming on the Confucian horizon.
A pig-tailed teenage girl with a solid physique and a blank expression brought us chopsticks and spoons and two cups of barley tea. She must’ve been about the same age that Chon Un-suk would’ve been except her parents weren’t rich. Not fortunate enough to attend middle school, she was forced to work. Ernie started to say something to her-probably something flirtatious-but then thought better of it. What was the point? He wasn’t going to be able to change her fate. Ever. As the quiet girl plodded away I thought she probably had a rough life ahead of her. But at least, unlike Chon Un-suk, she had life. Breath. Feeling.
When the noodles came, Ernie lifted a clump with his chopsticks and slurped them into his mouth. Still chewing, he started to talk.
“So far,” he said, “we don’t know shit.”
“That’s not true,” I replied. “We’re making progress.”
Ernie snorted. “Yeah. Like a snail. What we gotta do is beat the crap out of somebody.”
“Anybody in particular?”
Ernie shrugged. “Kuen-chana.” It doesn’t matter.
“Why should we beat somebody up?” I asked. “To gather information? Or just for the hell of it?”
“For both. I wouldn’t want to beat somebody up just for the hell of it.”
Instead of continuing down this road, I recapped what we knew so far, starting with motive.
According to PFC Anne Korvachek, Jill Matthewson’s roommate, Jill had been fed up with the stereo sexual harassment that women at the 2nd Division live with day in and day out, hour by hour. It came from men of low rank and men of high rank. All-pervasive. Complaining about it was about as useful as complaining about the weather. Still, when you don’t like the weather in the place you live, you move.
That’s what Jill Matthewson had done.
But there were other motives. Her friend, the Korean stripper Kim Yong-ai, owed a ton of money. To pay it off she and/or Jill had raised the Korean won equivalent of two thousand dollars. Exactly how they’d done that, we didn’t know. What could either one of them do to earn that kind of money? Crime, of course, came to mind. Had Jill
