“How long have you been stalking the Country Western All Stars?” I asked.
Parkwood grinned at me. “Ever since I saw the USO flyer in our weekly distribution. I haven’t missed a performance. Except for maybe the one tonight.” He grinned more broadly.
“Where are they playing tonight?” I asked.
“I thought you two were supposed to be watching them. At least I know Ernie here was staying as close to Marnie as he possibly could.”
It’s a crawly type of feeling to know that someone has been watching you, especially when we were the ones who were supposed to be providing security. But Parkwood was a nondescript kind of G.I.-a little under six feet tall, not heavy, not skinny, Caucasian with brown eyes and brown hair; probably the most prevalent description possible in the United States Army. All he had to do was sit quietly and he’d blend into any crowd. We’d never see him. And we never had.
The only thing unusual about him was his nose, round-tipped and slightly longer than normal.
“Did you pay Vance,” I asked, “to cover for you while you traveled around the country?”
“Hell, no. I wouldn’t pay that wimp nothing. He did what I told him and he was glad to do it.”
“Glad?” Ernie asked.
“Yeah, glad. So I wouldn’t beat the shit out of him.”
Parkwood guffawed at this, finding himself enormously funny.
Behind me, molars ground in the remnants of Colonel Laurel’s jaw. He wanted to try something, but it would be suicide and he knew it. Still, our odds might not get better, no matter how the scenario played out. Was Parkwood just going to force Ernie and me off the boat, so we could die out here, without wet suits, in the middle of the cold Yellow Sea? Or would he shoot us first? I decided to ask.
“Why did you bring us along, Parkwood? Why not just waste us back on the beach?”
Ernie flinched. Parkwood noticed it and grinned.
“Good thinking,” he told me. “Why not just waste you? I thought of that. But there’s always somebody who puts two and two together, and the ROK Navy patrols these waters like crazy, so I figured I’d better take a little insurance with me.”
“We’re hostages,” Ernie said.
“You’re just now figuring that out?”
I wanted to ask him about the rapes, but I decided not to ask directly. Parkwood was a guy who liked clever conversation, at least when he was the one holding an M-16.
“Those fences,” I said, “at the Anyang Railroad Station must’ve been quite a climb.”
“Not when you’re in good shape.” He took his hand off the rudder and stared at his palm. “I did cut myself, though.”
The boat swerved against the choppy sea. Quickly, Parkwood grabbed the rudder again and steered the little boat toward the north, or at least what I thought was the north. By now, we were out of sight of Cheju Island. How could Parkwood be so confident that he was heading in the right direction? Probably just counting on blind luck. Most people don’t realize that the Republic of Korea, besides the main land mass of the Korean peninsula, is composed of about 5,000 islands, Cheju being merely the largest among many. The Koreans are an ancient seafaring people. If Parkwood kept steering us in the general direction of north, he’d hit something eventually.
The air was growing increasingly frigid, and the steady sea spray battering my face and body didn’t help much. Ernie, so angry he could hardly talk, was turning blue. After more than an hour, Parkwood spotted something ahead of us.
“There it is,” he said. “Chujagun Island. We pass through the channel there and then it’s only a couple of more hours to the mainland.”
Parkwood was heading directly to the mainland, rather than traveling the much longer northeasterly route to Pusan.
“You’ve traveled by boat before?” I asked.
“Beats the ferry.”
Which is one of the reasons why we never saw his name on the Pusan-to-Cheju manifests.
“How’d you know,” I asked, “that day in Anyang, that the Blue Train was going to stop to let another train pass?”
“I didn’t,” he said. “I knew about the assassination, but I had no idea when the funeral train would come by.”
“So how did you plan to escape once you arrived at the Seoul Station?”
He shrugged. “Just winged it.”
“You have a lot of confidence in your abilities,” Ernie said.
“I’ve been at this a long time,” he said.
“‘At this’?”
“Yeah. Since I was a kid.”
Parkwood told us about his first train ride. It was back in the early fifties: ’54 or ’55, he thought, although he was too young at the time to be sure. Back then, the Super Chief of the Santa Fe Railroad was still a major mode of transportation to and from the West Coast.
“We boarded the train at Union Station in Los Angeles,” Parkwood told us. “Me, my mom, and my younger sister. The three of us, all dressed up like people did in those days. Me wearing a little suit with short pants and a bow tie, my sister with a new dress and a straw hat with a red ribbon on it. My mom, of course, looked like a blonde version of Barbara Stanwyck with a tight black skirt and net stockings and a tight vest to show off her figure. She even wore a pillbox hat with a half-veil on it, all the rage in those days.”
“Other than the clothes,” I said, “she looked like Marnie.”
“Oh, a pop psychologist.” He gazed out at sea and then back at me. “I guess she did, a little. We were quite a trio, and my mom said my dad hadn’t seen us off because he was busy working, but we all knew the truth. They’d fought, he’d left, and, for what seemed a long time to me at the time, he hadn’t been back. Other guys started showing up in our apartment. ‘Uncles,’ my mom called them. And then we boarded the train to go back east, to her parents’ house in Denver.”
Colonel Laurel turned his head as discreetly as he could, using his peripheral vision to scan the horizon.
“At each stop,” Parkwood continued, “my mom would tell us to wait and she’d get off the train to buy some Life Savers, and some cigarettes for herself. My sister and I were very well behaved compared to other kids: we didn’t complain and whine, and we didn’t make noise when the lights were lowered at night and people pushed their seats back to get some sleep. But I did worry when my mother left the train. I worried that she’d have to wait in line too long, that a cashier would be slow in making change. I worried that she might not return to the train in time. But she always did, just before the conductor yelled, ‘All Aboard!’ and the train pulled out of the station. The stops were mostly desert stations made of adobe and brick, with Indian women in bowler hats and blankets squatting in front of handmade pottery.”
Ernie interrupted. “Can you get to the point, Parkwood, while we’re still young?”
Parkwood grinned. “While I’m holding the rifle,” he said, “you have to listen.”
Ernie grunted.
Parkwood continued. “Finally, we reached the Rocky Mountains. At night, rain squalls and thunder and lightning reached out from jagged peaks like hands trying to grab us. And always the clickety-clack of the train’s metal wheels.
“I’m not sure exactly where it was,” Parkwood continued. “Somewhere before we reached Raton Pass, I remember that. My mom told us to wait and be good and she handed me a half-eaten roll of Life Savers. This time she didn’t say why she was getting off. She just did. I waited. So did my sister, although she was younger and therefore less concerned. Finally, I heard the conductor yell, ‘All aboard!’ I stared at the door, the door my mother usually returned through, but she didn’t appear. The engines started and then the train began to roll.
“I considered getting out of my seat to look for her, to tell the conductor to stop, but I did neither. My mother had told me repeatedly not to get out of my seat, and I always listened to her. She was my goddess and I worshiped her. I always did as she ordered.”