Mr. Kill (26 page)

About a mile out, still in sight of the coastline, Parkwood ordered the haenyo off the boat.

Colonel Laurel protested. “We’re too far out,” he said. “They’ll never make it.”

“Bull,” Parkwood replied. “These women can swim for miles.”

The haenyo apparently agreed with him. They glanced back at Colonel Laurel, as if in apology. He nodded back, granting them permission. After all, on Cheju Island women are the breadwinners—or seafood winners, if you will—and these women had families to support. As sleekly as a pair of seals, the two women rolled off the edge of the boat and started paddling their way toward shore. Once they were about a hundred yards away, they stopped and stared back, as if saying good-bye. Then they turned toward shore and started seriously stroking toward home.

Parkwood ordered Ernie and me farther toward the front of the boat. Now the three of us were on one end, Parkwood on the other. He kept his finger in the trigger housing of the M-16, the barrel lying loosely on his lap. With the other hand he steered the boat away from Cheju Island.

“Where are we going, Parkwood?” I asked.

“Shut the fuck up.”

I shut up.

After a few minutes of glaring at the endless sea, he spoke again, this time directing his comment to Ernie.

“So, how’s Marnie?” he asked.

“Marnie?” Ernie was as surprised as I was.

“You know who I’m talking about,” Parkwood replied. “Is she still screwing Freddy Ray?”

The original complaints by the Country Western All Stars regarding various missing items—a microphone, a pair of panties, and finally a single cowboy boot—we had assumed were the results of carelessness or the booty of the occasional souvenir-hunting thief. They had seen a pattern in it; Ernie and I hadn’t. Now I realized that those were precisely the items that I’d seen earlier in the living quarters at the commo site atop Mount Halla, all jumbled in with a ton of other items, but there nevertheless. Most recently I’d also seen a red lace bra and panties. Originally, I’d written it off to G.I. bravado. There’s not a barracks in the US Army where a set of female panties isn’t prominently displayed somewhere, as a trophy of conquest.

“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.”

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.