Everything was quiet except for the tiny bells tinkling and the red spirit flags flapping in the late-night breeze. Doc Yong didn’t bother to knock. She pushed open the wooden doorway in the gate and the rusted hinges groaned, like a ghost being called from the dead.
I hesitated for a second, knowing from Doc Yong’s grim expression and from the silence that surrounded us like a shroud, that something was desperately wrong. I crouched, stepped through the little gate, and entered the darkness of the quiet courtyard.
My mother died before I even started school. My father, the coward that he was, shrugged off his responsibility toward me and took off back to Mexico. That left me, U.S. citizen George Sueno, alone in the world. Growing up as a foster child in East L.A. was difficult but what kept me going through all of it was what my mother had told me before she died. “Be good, Jorge mio,” she said. “Never betray those you love.”
The problem was that, so far, I’d never found anyone to love. I wasn’t even sure, exactly, what the word meant. Were they talking about the feelings I had toward my mom? Or where they talking about new feelings I would develop some day as I matured, feelings that I would have toward a young woman closer to my own age?
I knew about lust. That feeling was quite familiar to me. In fact, lust was an enemy that never let me rest. Visions of sex exploded in my brain night and day and from what I could tell of other young G.I. s, I wasn’t alone. But love, I suspected, was something else entirely.
I watched Doc Yong walking in front of me, arms crossed on her chest, her head down, straight black hair sticking out beneath the edge of her red cap. What was most astonishing about her was her relentless desire to help the business girls of Itaewon. To offer them a hand. To pull them out of the mire in which they were so securely stuck. Doc Yong was almost thirty so she was older than me. I didn’t believe the age difference mattered and so far she had treated me strictly as a colleague. Sort of her own personal U.S. Army liaison officer. A job she needed done because the Korean business girls who swamped her clinic had so many interactions, most of them unpleasant, with 8th Army G.I. s and there always seemed to be something that needed to be worked out with military officialdom. I was happy to perform the role and the closer I was to her the better I felt.
Tonight, I sensed, was a turning point for us. She was taking me somewhere, preparing to show me something that would take us beyond our workday acquaintance stage. Something told me that what I was about to see would be horrible beyond belief. And I believed that this horrible event, whatever it was, would either bring Doc Yong and me closer together or it would split us apart forever. I didn’t know which.
So I was braced not just for blood but for heartache. Either or both, would not be new to me. I could handle anything, or at least that’s what I thought at the time.
Auntie Mee’s hooch was silent and completely dark. I took a few tentative steps across the varnished wooden floor. Silvery moonlight filtered through a back window. A shadow moved through the moonbeams. Doc Yong. She had crouched in front of a wooden cabinet and was fumbling around, looking for something. Finally, she found it. Cardboard scratched on cardboard and then a match scraped and hissed. A tiny fire erupted and I turned my head away from the sudden glow. Deft hands lit two candles. Doc Yong handed one to me.
“Come,” she said.
We walked toward the moonglow. Wind rustled silk curtains. In the distance a dog howled. There weren’t many howling dogs in Korea. People lived too close together and they worked too hard to allow their sleep to be disrupted by some canine barking at the moon. So a noisy pooch was seldom tolerated. But for some reason, tonight, a dog howled. Maybe it wasn’t a dog. Maybe it was something else. I pushed such superstitious thoughts out of my mind. Instead, I searched the shadows.
They looked back at me.
Martin Limon
G.I. Bones
13
Auntie Mee’s hooch hadn’t been trashed. In all my years in law enforcement I’d never seen anyone break into a house and be so respectful of the furniture and the artifacts and the personal possessions within. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed. Nothing, that is, except for Auntie Mee.
She was still wearing her silk robes. She had been kneeling in front of the small table upon which lay her ancient codex. It was open to an astrological entry. I held my candle closer to examine the script. Chinese. Although I recognized a few characters-like those for sun and moon and the autumn season-I couldn’t read enough to make any sense of it. Doc Yong knelt next to me.
“The rites of burial,” she said. “How to honor a dead person, how to prepare their grave, how to place them in it, what rituals to perform to assuage their spirit and make sure that they continue to receive honor from their living descendents and therefore will be allowed to take their rightful place in heaven.”
“All that here,” I said, pointing at the long rows of script.
“Yes.” Doc Yong flipped the thick page. “And on further. We Koreans have no end of instructions when it comes to honoring the dead.”
“And she was studying this,” I said, “just before her murderer showed up?”
“Maybe after,” Doc Yong replied.
“After?”
I thought about it. It made sense. Auntie Mee seemed so composed in death. Her corpse lay back on the wood-slat floor, her knees curled in front of her, as if she’d been kneeling in front of this cheiksang, book table, just prior to death. And she’d purposely opened her codex to the rites for the dead, leaving instructions to whoever found her as to the proper method of her burial. So she’d known someone was going to kill her. Possibly they’d talked. Possibly, Auntie Mee had slipped on the same long silk robe in which she gave psychic readings so she’d be presentable in death. But who would do that? Who would face their murderer calmly and quietly and accept their fate? Why hadn’t she tried to run? Why hadn’t she screamed? Why hadn’t she put up a fight?
It only made sense if Auntie Mee knew that there was no place for her to run to. If she knew that whoever was here to kill her-or whoever had ordered her to be killed-was too powerful to resist. Auntie Mee’s only source of income was fortune-telling and psychic readings. If she couldn’t do that, then she couldn’t live. And if the person who wanted her killed was powerful enough to hunt her down, to find her wherever she happened to set up shop, then she might’ve decided that there was no use trying to run. That there was no use trying to fight. Better to accept her fate gracefully. To go out in style, wearing her best silk robes and leaving instructions for her burial so the rites performed after her death would bring honor to her memory and give her prestige on her journey to join her ancestors.
“She didn’t fight,” I told Doc Yong.
“No.”
The cause of death was strangulation. Her neck was bruised and her jaw was cracked open; her tongue lolled out purple and bloated. She’d bitten her own tongue and lips while trying to gasp for breath and she must’ve lost her resolve to die peacefully because she had scratched at her neck with her own fingernails. Long red welts ran down the smooth flesh. A silk rope lay next to her corpse, a few strands of Auntie Mee’s long black hair entertwined with it. The rope was composed of at least a half-dozen plies of silk strips braided together and then tied into thick knots at the ends. There was little bleeding. Only what Auntie Mee’s frantic scratching had caused on her own neck. Her body looked frail and helpless now in death. But calm. Acceptant.