Parkwood gave a half laugh and looked around, as if just remembering that he was floating in the middle of the Yellow Sea.
“She never returned, of course,” he said. “My sister and I rode on, alone, wondering what to do, until a nice young man in a neatly pressed suit and a snap-brim hat sat down in the seat my mother had left. He talked to us. Nicely. I told him that my mother hadn’t gotten back on at the last stop. He nodded kindly and told me that she would almost surely catch up with us, maybe at the next stop, maybe at our destination, but there was nothing to worry about. I felt so grateful to him for saying that.
“My sister had to go to the bathroom. She’d been waiting for my mom to return because Mom always told her not to go by herself. The nice young man offered to take her. Together, they walked off hand in hand. They were gone a long time.”
Parkwood stared at us.
“It all seems obvious now, doesn’t it? A woman who’s lost her husband no longer wants the responsibility of raising two brats, so she takes off. A man riding on a train sees an opportunity and takes advantage of it and gets himself a little four-year-old stuff in the rolling bathroom of a train.”
Ernie stared at Parkwood with unalloyed disgust.
“So you’ve had a tough time, Parkwood. Welcome to the club. But that doesn’t justify the rape of two women, the murder of one, and certainly not the torture and murder of a fellow soldier, Specialist Vance.”
Parkwood grinned at him, happy at being the center of attention. Ernie decided to pop his bubble.
“Later, the nice-looking man on the Super Chief took you into the bathroom too, didn’t he, Parkwood?”
Parkwood’s fist tightened around the trigger housing. “No! He didn’t!”
“Sure he did,” Ernie said. “That’s why you added Vance to your ‘checklist.’ Probably reminded you of him. You probably don’t even have a sister. And when the dapper young man took you into the men’s room, you sort of liked it. You liked the stink and the degradation of it, and the rough sex. Maybe you liked it a little too much.”
The sea was choppier now. We were entering an isthmus about a half mile in width between two islands. Parkwood raised the rifle; but instead of pointing it at Ernie, he pointed it at me.
“You keep it up,” Parkwood told Ernie, “and I’ll add him to my checklist. I’ll force him off the boat. You can watch him drown.”
Ernie shrugged. “He’s a good swimmer.”
“Not with a bullet in his thigh, he’s not.”
Colonel Laurel seemed to have spotted something. I wasn’t sure what, but I expected him to make a move. I braced myself.
“Parkwood!” Laurel shouted. “You put that goddamn weapon down. Now! And quit pointing it at your fellow soldiers.”
Parkwood gazed at him curiously. “Are you serious?”
The colonel’s mangled jaw tightened. He sat up as straight as he could in the rocking boat. “You’re damn right, I’m serious. You’ve done enough damage.” He started to rise. “Now give me that goddamn weapon!”
With his right hand, Parkwood kept the rifle pointed straight ahead, his left hand steering the outboard motor. He continued to stare at Colonel Laurel, flabbergasted at his temerity to demand, in this little boat, that the M-16 rifle be turned over to him. Colonel Laurel rose to his full height.
Behind Parkwood, and all around the boat, black orbs rose out of the water. Startled, Parkwood turned to see what they were, and as he did so, I leaped toward him. Ernie yelled, and before Parkwood could turn and re-aim the weapon, we were on him. Scratching, clawing, in a frantic lust to turn the barrel of the M-16 away from us and up toward the sky. Ernie hit the rifle, and it pointed into the sea. I plowed into Parkwood’s chest just as the rifle fired. He reeled backward, letting go of the outboard motor, which immediately sputtered and died. Somehow he kept his balance and shoved me back slightly, but there was no stopping me. I bulled forward. Parkwood tilted backward and, with me following, we both fell into the sea.
The cold sucked every ounce of breath out of my lungs. I was underwater. I couldn’t breathe. Above, in the murky green, the boat rolled slowly by and all around me black silhouettes glided by. Seals, I thought. Or sharks.
And then one of them bit me.
18
Actually, it wasn’t a bite. Rather, it was a strong hand that pulled me to the surface.
Sputtering, coughing, gazing around me in the cold sea, I was disoriented and it took a while for anything to come into focus. A half-dozen black figures floated nearby. Then I realized who they were. The haenyo. Somehow they’d anticipated Parkwood’s path and set up an ambush in this narrow strait. There were many clans of haenyo throughout these islands, not all on Cheju, and it seemed they communicated well. Someone shouted. Colonel Laurel. He was in the water too, swimming madly, and then I realized what he was angry about. The boat was floating away. In the melee, the boat had almost been capsized. Parkwood had fallen off, the M-16 rifle with him, but he’d managed to climb back aboard. I raised myself as high as I could in the choppy waves but could only see the back of someone hunched over the outboard motor. In a few seconds, the engine sputtered and then roared and finally started to pull away until it disappeared into the mist.
The haenyo motioned for me to start swimming for shore. I did. But I stopped every few yards to survey who was left in our little school of swimmers. Laurel shouted, “Your partner, he’s not here!”
“Where is he?”
“He’s still in the boat. I think he hit his head on the bulkhead. Hard.”
“Christ,” I said. “How about the M-16?”
“The bottom of the ocean,” Laurel said.
“We have to get to a phone,” I said.
“That we do,” Colonel Laurel agreed.
I turned and started swimming toward land. I was swimming against the current. It was difficult. One of the haenyo came up beside me and motioned for me to aim farther to the left. In twenty minutes, Colonel Laurel and I and half a dozen women of the sea were climbing up a sea-soaked ladder to the dry, splintery planks of a fisherman’s landing.
The boat was found late that evening, about 2 a.m., on an island called Shinji-do, some thirty miles north of the straits where the haenyo had rescued Colonel Laurel and me. According to the local KNPs, no trace of Parkwood had been discovered. Ernie, however, had been found. Alive. He’d been transferred to a medical clinic and from there a ROK Navy chopper had flown him to Hialeah Compound in Pusan.
I learned all this through a phone conversation with Inspector Kill. He was coordinating the all-points bulletin the Korean National Police had put out for Sergeant Ronald T. Parkwood. From the landing point of the little craft on Shinji-do, it was a short walk to a main highway; from there, it was thought Parkwood had waved down a local cab and caught a ride to the Shinji Bus Station. A ticket seller there remembered trying to communicate with a hairy-fisted foreigner who wanted to buy a ticket to Pusan. Of course, she couldn’t sell him a direct ticket to Pusan. He had to buy a ticket north to Kuangju first, and from there he’d be able to catch the eastbound express that left every twenty minutes for Pusan. The foreigner hadn’t understood all this but hadn’t made a fuss, because the bus to Kuangju had been about to leave and apparently he’d been in a hurry. His change, the ticket seller said, was thirty won-about five cents-and he didn’t bother to wait for it, just grabbed his ticket and left. The young woman was afraid that the police were there about the thirty won but relieved when she discovered they weren’t.
“Anyway,” she told the KNPs, “foreigners are always trouble.”
The KNPs were still trying to locate the bus driver and the stewardess on the Shinji-to-Kuangju express, but so far they hadn’t found them. Kill doubted they’d have much to say, but it was a base he had to cover. Police in Kuangju were at the bus station now, interviewing ticket sellers and others who might’ve spotted Parkwood. There are no US military bases in that part of Korea, so chances were that an American would be remembered.