“Meikju kajjiwa!” Ernie shouted. Bring me a beer!
A space was opened for him, and he sat down with the girls at the table. One hustled over to the bar and returned with an ice-cold OB. Ernie pulled cash out of his pocket and ordered another beer for me, and then asked the girls what they were drinking. Cola and Orange Fanta were the main orders, and soon everyone had something to drink and Ernie sent one of the girls over to play a few tunes on the jukebox. Soul music: Jackie Wilson wailing an unrequited plea. Within five minutes, Ernie had the girls of the Half Half Club laughing and relaxed as if we were all old friends.
I appreciated his work. Relaxing them so I could start asking questions, but I knew I had to hurry. There were no GIs in the club right now, but once they started showing up later this afternoon, the girls would be distracted, and my chance at finding out what the Half Half Club had to do with the smiling woman would be diminished.
The first girl I talked to was tall and dark-complected and told me before I asked that her daddy had been a Creole from Louisiana.
“I never see,” she said, “but my ohma, she show me picture many times.”
I pulled out the sketch of the smiling woman.
The reaction of the girls was as if I had reached into a velvet bag and pulled out the Hope Diamond. They gathered around, oohing and aahing, jostling for a look.
“You know her?” I asked.
“We know,” one of the girls said. “Yun Ai-ja. Best looking half-half jo-san in Korea.”
Jo-san. GI slang, from Japanese, for a business girl.
“Do you know where she is now?”
They all shook their heads.
“But she used to work here,” I said.
They nodded. She’d left, according to them, about three months ago. Approximately the same time she arrived up north at the doorstep of the Uichon mama-san.
“Why’d she leave?”
Eyes dropped, avoiding my stare. I waited, and when I received no response, I folded up the sketch and unrolled the sketches of PFC Rodney K. Boltworks and the other man, who was Yun Ai-ja’s younger brother.
“Do you know either one of these two men?” I asked.
Everyone shook their heads no.
“Answer the man’s questions,” Ernie said gruffly. “Why did Yun Ai-ja leave the Half Half Club?”
The women who were standing backed up a half step. The women sitting bowed their heads.
There is much talk about Asian women being submissive. Maybe whoever said that wasn’t talking about Koreans. I’ve seen Korean women stand in the middle of the street and exchange punches, toe to toe, with a grown man. And I’d never met a Korean woman who wasn’t feisty when the need presented itself. But these women of the Half Half Club seemed particularly fearful, as if life had beaten them down and their only defense was abject submission to anyone who held the slightest hint of power.
Ernie repeated his question. Finally, the Creole girl sang out.
“Ask Fanny,” she said. “She tell you.”
“Fanny?”
“Yes.”
Ernie stood up but I waved for him to stay put. He nodded, knowing that I meant for him to protect our rear. Two of the Half Half girls took me by the hand and led me to a dark corner beyond the bar. A flicker of candlelight revealed a steep stairway. They pointed up. I left them and climbed the creaking stairs.
As I climbed, an aroma sharpened, biting deeply into my sinuses. At first I thought it was incense. Then I realized the smell was too fierce and disagreeable to be incense. I took a deep breath and held it. Hanyak. Chinese medicine. Herbs and exotic ingredients boiled to within an inch of their fundamental essence.
Whoever this Fanny was, she figured to be sick.
The stairs of the Half Half Club squeaked. The sharp, almost toxic odor of hanyak grew unbearable. Holding my breath, I gazed down a varnished wooden-slat hallway. There, in a small room at the end, a brown earthen jar sat atop a flickering purple flame. I stepped closer. The spout of the earthen jar was covered with a thick wad of cheesecloth. Pungent steam moistened the cloth and bubbled upward, carrying the medicinal scent of ancient herbal remedies into the air.
“Nugu ya?” someone shouted. Who is it?
A woman’s voice, in the room next to the small kitchen.
“Na ya,” I assured her. It’s me.
I slipped back a flimsy wooden door.
She lay on a down-filled mat, rolled out on a floor covered with vinyl. Her back was propped against the wall. A small window was partially open, letting in fresh air and the midafternoon sun.
The young Asian woman stared at me with large hazel-green eyes.
She was thin, with long legs. But her cheeks were full, as if she might’ve been a rotund woman at one time. Her hands pushed down on the floor, straining. She was trying to rise, preparing for flight. But her legs couldn’t join in the movement. They were atrophied, useless. And then I realized what she was and why she was sitting here alone. She was a cripple.
“Fanny?” I asked.
She nodded warily.
Her hair and skin were lighter than any of the women downstairs, though not as light as the smiling woman’s. Her complexion was smooth and unblemished, but she was not a particularly attractive woman. She wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Stateside supermarket or laboring in a barley field on the Russian steppes. Her age I estimated at about twenty.
I squatted slowly, and crossed my arms over my knees.
“My name is Sueno,” I told her. “I’m looking for your friend, Yun Ai-ja.”
Fanny stared at me without emotion. I wondered if she’d understood me. I decided to speak again, this time using Korean, when I realized her eyes had filled with tears.
It took a while to calm Fanny down. She didn’t get many visitors-that’s what had upset her, or so she said, and when I’d asked about Yun Ai-ja. I’d brought back a lot of memories. The sound of laughter, from Ernie and the Half Half girls, drifted up the stairway. Before pestering her with more questions, I offered to take her downstairs. She hesitated, but after a little coaxing, relented. I called for the Creole girl and she and her friend came upstairs. While I waited in the hall, they helped Fanny dress. When she was ready, I carried her down. According to the Creole girl, Fanny hadn’t been downstairs since the “accident” three months ago.
I sat her in a chair at a table in the ballroom. Ernie ordered Chinese food for everyone, and when the delivery boy arrived, Ernie and I moved three cocktail tables together. The boy laid out yakimandu, fried meat-filled dumplings; chapchae, noodles made of sweet potato flour; and pibin pap, rice and vegetables mixed with hot pepper paste. Then we sat down and me and Fanny and Ernie and all the girls at the Half Half Club enjoyed a small banquet.
A couple of hours later, the GIs started to arrive. They dropped coins into the jukebox and ordered drinks. Ernie and I moved to a table out of the way. But I kept Fanny in a chair next to me, and she told me of the night she’d been hurt and of the man who attacked her and knocked her down the stairs. And how in the melee the woman the man was after, Yun Ai-ja, managed to escape.
“She left everything,” Fanny told me. “Her clothes, her money, everything. Except her mom.”
“Her mom?”
“Yes. Her mom. You know, box hold her mom.”
Not a casket, surely. And then I understood. “Her ashes?”