The first GI bar district you came to.”
“But you don’t know us,” I countered.
She laughed. It was like a brass bell ringing. “I know you well enough.”
Ernie straightened his jacket, uncomfortable at not having his. 45.
“So you’ve been shadowing us,” Ernie said. “So you must’ve seen Bufford and Weatherwax. Are they alone or are there more MPs backing them up?”
“Alone. Come on,” she said, motioning with Ernie’s. 45. “No more talk.”
At the mouth of the alley, she motioned for us to wait and then stepped past us. She looked both ways and then entered the narrow pedestrian walkway. She trotted down the path, past brick-walled residences, until she reached a muddy thoroughfare. She waved for us to follow. When Ernie and I approached, she tossed Ernie’s. 45 back to him. He caught it in midair.
“Be careful with that thing,” she told him. “Are you sober enough to drive?”
“Always.”
She turned and we followed her through the alleys until we reached neon. Ernie’s jeep sat thirty yards away. Still padlocked. Still untouched. Between us and the jeep, rows of bars were still open, rock and roll blaring out of open doors. Korean women stood in front. Business girls. Now, less than an hour until the midnight curfew, they could no longer wait demurely for some GI to wander into their club and sit down next to them and start spending money on them. They had to parade along the street and hustle. The few GIs who were still out were being accosted by the girls. Some of the GIs stopped and chatted. Some allowed themselves to be pulled into a nightclub, maybe for a last drink, maybe to negotiate a night with a beauteous lady.
At a distant intersection, a Camp Howze MP jeep roared past. We took that as our cue to emerge from the shadows and jog toward the parked jeep.
The business girls backed up as we ran past. A few of them glanced at Ernie and me, but most of them kept their eyes riveted on Corporal Jill Matthewson. They’d seen uniformed MPs before, plenty of them, but they’d never seen one shaped like this. Jill seemed slighter than she had appeared in her official photo. Even beneath her bulky fatigues one could see that her waist was small and her ample bosom had to be firmly held in place. Most of the business girls would never have seen a female American soldier before because the few American women assigned to Division were all stationed at the headquarters at Camp Casey.
As soon as the Korean business girls realized what they were seeing, a murmur arose amongst them. They elbowed one another, pointed, and stared in awe as Jill Matthewson waded through them. Jill didn’t acknowledge their attention. Her focus was on the jeep. But it was clear to me that these young, put-upon, Korean business girls, had just seen something akin to a miracle. A woman in a position of power. A woman leading men. A woman wearing a pistol and a uniform, set on her own self-determined goal, not letting anything stand in her way.
Ernie noticed the reaction and said to a couple of the business girls, “Hey, what about me?”
They ignored him.
As we climbed in the jeep, I folded myself into the tattered back seat; Jill sat up front next to Ernie. The business girls approached the jeep, as if mesmerized. Still, Jill Matthewson acted as if she hadn’t noticed their reaction.
For a moment, sitting in the back seat, I thought of pulling my. 45, disarming Corporal Jill Matthewson, and placing her under arrest. But then what would I do? Take her back to Seoul? Charge her with being AWOL? Eventually, I’d be forced to turn her over to the Division provost marshal. No way. First, I was going to encourage her cooperation and hear what she had to say. Then we’d make a decision as to what our next move would be.
Ernie started the jeep, jammed it into gear. He rolled forward slowly because of the awestruck business girls surrounding us. Finally, when he was clear of them, he gunned the engine to the next intersection and started to turn right, toward the main paved street that led to Reunification Road.
“Not right,” Jill told him. “Left. Back to the Bunny Club.”
“Why?” Ernie asked.
“You’ll see. Just do as I tell you.”
Ernie shrugged and turned the wheel to the left. As we approached the Bunny Club, the glow from the neon out front illuminated the jeep that Bufford and Weatherwax had driven up in. Still sitting there, untouched.
“Pull over!” Jill shouted.
Ernie did. Before the jeep had come to a full stop, she leaped out, running, and for a moment I thought she was escaping. She ran toward the front of the Bunny Club. The designation stenciled in white lettering on the jeep’s bumper said: HQ CO, 2ND ID PMO. Translation: Headquarters Company of the 2nd Infantry Division Provost Marshal’s Office. I pulled my. 45, fearing that Bufford and Weatherwax might appear at any moment.
Jill Matthewson approached the jeep, drew her. 45, and took aim. She fired six rounds; two into the radiator, one each into the four tires. Satisfied, she reholstered her pistol, trotted back, and jumped into the passenger seat next to Ernie.
“We ain’t left yet?” she asked.
Ernie stared at her for a moment, immobile. Then he seemed to come to his senses, nodded grimly, let out the clutch, and jammed the little jeep into gear. We lurched forward. He gunned the engine, twisted the steering wheel, and after a few hairpin turns, the three of us sped off toward Reunification Road.
When we told her that Private Marvin Druwood was dead, Jill Matthewson slammed her fist into the wall of the hooch. The entire building shook.
“Damn!” she shouted.
She wouldn’t look at us. She stared at the floor, shaking her head, and then she gazed out the open sliding double doors of the little hooch.
“Damn, damn, damn,” she said. “Private Marvin Druwood, United States Army Military Police Corps. Innocent little Marv Druwood.”
I thought of asking something like, You knew him well? But every sentence I composed mentally sounded lame, so I kept my mouth shut.
After leaving Bongil-chon, Jill had instructed Ernie to turn north on Reunification Road, guiding us farther away from Seoul. A mile later, she had us turn left onto a two-lane highway running east. For twenty minutes, we drove through rice paddies and wooded hills barely illuminated by a rising moon. Finally, we reached the town of Wondang. There were no U.S. military compounds anywhere near here and, as far as I could tell, no ROK Army compounds either.
We’d parked the jeep near the city center in front of a Buddhist temple. According to Jill, the temple held an ancient bronze bell that was sounded by bald monks every morning at dawn. Two blocks farther on, we reached a walled compound into which were crammed about a dozen hooches, including Jill’s.
Inside the hooch, we sat on an ondol floor. It was a comfortable little hooch, old but well maintained; Jill Matthewson seemed to have mastered all the intricacies of Korean housekeeping. As soon as we arrived, she’d unlaced her combat boots and slipped on a pair of rubber sandals. She used metal tongs to reach into a subterranean stone furnace at the base of the outer wall of the hooch. She pulled out one flaming charcoal briquette and replaced it with a new one. Next, she carried the spent briquette over to a cement storage space tucked away from the other hooches so as to prevent fire.
Then she observed as Ernie and I slipped off our shoes and stepped up onto the wooden porch. After we had entered the hooch, she used a moist rag to wipe down the porch’s immaculate varnished surface. In the cement- floored kitchen-adjacent to the one-room living space- she had used a wooden match to light a single butane burner. Then she’d gone outside to fill a brass teapot with water from an outdoor spigot. Fifteen minutes later she’d unfolded the legs of a one-foot-high, mother-of-pearl serving table and Ernie and I were sipping Folgers instant coffee ladled from a short bottle with a Korean customs duty stamp emblazoned on it. We sat on flat, square cushions covered with silk.
“Where’s Kim Yong-ai?” I asked, once Jill had settled down.
“At work,” Jill replied.
“Where does she work?”
Jill eyed me suspiciously. “Why do you want to know?”
I raised two open palms in mock surrender. “Just curious.”
“I know you’re curious,” she replied. “That’s why you spent so much time looking for me. You want to find out
