On the field radio back at the checkpoint, he’d report our sighting to the Division PMO. In minutes, Bufford and Weatherwax and whatever reinforcements they could muster would be on their way south. We had a blonde American female with us. There’d be no doubt it was us.
“Let’s move out,” Ernie said.
Jill nodded, so did I. No discussion necessary.
The rest of the day consisted of a long afternoon and a longer night. We stayed away from the Main Supply Route and military patrols and military checkpoints. We cadged rides on three-wheeled tractors, on the backs of trucks, and even, for a while, on an ox-drawn cart. Steadily but surely we made our way north. After night fell, we walked; afraid to take one of the country kimchee cabs because the Division MP checkpoints would be moving from spot to spot and their mobile patrols would be prowling the back roads. Best to stay on foot, on ancient pathways leading from village to village. As far as I knew, the Division MPs didn’t even know these pathways existed.
Convoys of headlights prowled the paved roads.
Finally, about an hour before the midnight curfew, we stopped at a yoinsuk, a traditional Korean inn. It was situated atop a gently sloping hill that had three pedestrian pathways leading to it, but no parking lot. The building’s lumber was ancient; it had probably been constructed long before the Korean War. When I asked the proprietress about it, she told me that the inn had been built before the Japanese Occupation in 1910, back in those halcyon days when the king of Korea still sat on his throne in Seoul. The name of the inn was the Chowol-tang, Temple of the Autumn Moon.
It was a dump.
The soup they brought had no meat in it, only bean curd, and I had to pluck a couple of tiny pebbles out of the rice that accompanied the soup. Still, after a day of hiking through the hills of Kyongki Province, the chow tasted delicious. Once again, we three slept in the same room, on the warm ondol floor, but this time a family of strangers stayed with us, huddled together on the other side of the room. After eating, I was too exhausted to even attempt to speak Korean to them, so I spread out my gray cotton sleeping mat, pulled a tattered silk comforter over my sore shoulders, and was asleep before my head hit the bean-filled pillow.
At dawn, the three of us were up and ready to go. I sorely wished that I could take a shower and change into clean clothes, but there were no shower facilities here at the Temple of the Autumn Moon and the bag containing my change of clothes had been left behind after Ernie and I were ambushed at fish heaven. I was stuck with the same old sports shirt, the same old blue jeans, and the same old nylon jacket. After using the outdoor byonso, we declined breakfast, hoping we could find something better down the road. We did. Pears plucked fresh from an orchard.
Before noon, we stood on a hill looking down on the fog-shrouded city of Tongduchon. To the east, Camp Casey spread like a slothful potentate reclining across acres of arable land. Behind the heavily fortified main gate, the statue of the twenty-foot-tall MP, his pink face still smiling, seemed to be staring right at us.
First, I found a phone.
In a run-down teahouse a couple of blocks west of the Tongduchon City Market, the place where Ernie and I’d been shot at. The sleepy proprietress barely found the energy to shove my two hundred won into the pocket of her sleeping robe. Then she shoved the red phone across the counter, turned, and slid back a door that led to her sleeping quarters. She wasn’t open for business yet but Ernie and I had insisted she open.
I dialed the number for the 8th Army operator and waited. And waited. And waited. I hung up and tried again.
Still the same sound of static and clicking, but no human voice.
“The lines are down,” Ernie said.
Happens all the time, but why now?
“We’ll try again later,” Jill said.
“Right.”
I tried not to let it bother me. Still, it seemed an omen. Ernie and I were in over our heads, 8th Army wasn’t backing us up, the 2nd Division provost marshal had apparently unleashed his men on a murderous rampage. How often do GIs knowingly shoot at other GIs?
Not often. GIs steal from one another, they seduce one another’s wives, they lie about one another in order to cop a quick promotion, they do all those things but they seldom shoot at one another. Still, that’s exactly what’d been happening routinely ever since Brandy brought Ernie and me back to Division.
“Brandy,” I said. “At the Black Cat Club.”
“Too dangerous,” Ernie replied.
He meant that the ville would probably be crawling with MPs.
Jill started to tell us about Brandy.
“She was nice to me,” Jill told us. “She helped me find my hooch and she introduced me to Kim Yong-ai and then she even came to my hooch to show me how to change charcoal and where the trash goes and things like that.”
Since we had a minute, I asked Jill what exactly had happened at the Forest of the Seven Clouds. How had she and Kim Yong-ai managed to escape when Bufford and Weatherwax had come looking for her?
“Colonel Han,” she said. “A ROK Army colonel. He’d been in there before with important businessmen and Kimmie and I served him. He speaks English really well and he was curious about my situation, but I didn’t tell him that I was AWOL. The day Bufford and Weatherwax came looking for me, Colonel Han put me and Kim in the back of his canvas-covered jeep, threw a tarp over us, and drove us right past the checkpoints the MPs had set up.”
It figured. In Korea, what with 700,000 bloodthirsty communist soldiers across the DMZ just itching to invade, the ROK Army is untouchable. Even the president of the country is a former ROK Army general. Nobody can inspect ROK Army jeeps. Not even 2nd Infantry Division MPs.
The idea hit me suddenly. It seemed so obvious, once I thought about it, that I must’ve been awfully tired not to have thought of it earlier.
“I know where we can find a phone.”
“We have a phone,” Ernie said.
“But also a place to hide out, while we wait for the lines to be reconnected.”
Ernie saw it, too. “The Chon family residence,” he said.
Then I told Jill about what Madame Chon had said about a wandering ghost. And about the kut. Without hesitation, Jill agreed to help.
Ten minutes later, we were standing at the front gate of the Chon family residence.
Jill pressed the button of the intercom and told the person who answered who she was. Immediately, the gate buzzed open. The elderly maid stepped off the lacquered front porch and into her slippers, and following her came Madame Chon. She rushed toward Jill, her arms thrown open, and the two women embraced. Both of them were crying.
I turned to Ernie. He turned away from the two women. Then he said, “Enough of this bullshit. Let’s go shoot somebody.”
“We will,” I told him. “But first we have to talk to a ghost.”
The only light in the large back room of the Chon family residence came from the flickering glow of thirty-six candles. Above the candles sat a gleaming bronze effigy of Kumbokju, the chubby god of plenty of Korean myth. The sharp tang of incense permeated the room, and about thirty guests sat on the floor on plump, silk-covered cushions. The guest list included myself, Ernie, Corporal Jill Mathewson, and what seemed like every middle-aged matron in the city of Tongduchon. Since his daughter’s death, Chon Un-suk’s father had been working long hours at his business in Seoul and seldom showed his face in Tongduchon. Maybe because of grief. Maybe he had a mistress. Who knows? But one thing I knew for sure is that no self-respecting Korean male wants to attend a kut.