I took a hit and handed it to Ernie. I held the smoke in my lungs while I spoke. “I’m look for Bogard.”
Everybody laughed.
“Usually,” Duckworth said, “people are trying to get away from him.”
“Why?”
Duckworth shrugged. “He’s mean, he’s broke, and he doesn’t take no for an answer-on anything.”
The GIs and the girls sniffled and snorted in their efforts not to lose any of the precious herbal fumes.
“Where can I find him?”
“If you got money, he’ll find you.”
I waited.
Duckworth broke the silence. “Find the River Rat and you’ll find Bogard.”
“The River Rat?”
“Yeah. He lives with her. Sort of.”
“Sort of?”
“She catches a lot of GIs,” Duckworth said, “but usually just before curfew, when he needs a bunk, Bogard goes over to her hooch. If there’s somebody there, he’s just shit out of luck. Bogard tosses him out into the street.”
The GIs giggled and snorted some more.
“How do I find the River Rat?”
“She lives by the river,” someone said. The rush of air through nostrils increased.
“She walks the streets,” Duckworth said. “And since there’s only one street in the village, you can’t miss her.”
She blocked the way.
A GI stopped and listened to her for a moment and then shook his head. He stepped around her, but she grabbed him by the arm and seemed to be pleading with him. Keeping his hands in his pockets, he roughly pulled his elbow from her grip and continued past.
She smiled and waved her hand a little, as if saying goodbye to an old friend.
It was getting colder. Scattered flakes of snow hit the oil-splattered blacktop and vanished as if they’d never existed. GIs and half-dressed Korean girls scurried from club to club, running away from the small, blustering snow clouds that chased them like restless apparitions.
As she walked toward us, I turned to Ernie. “She’s got to be the River Rat.”
Her small breasts only slightly pushed out the thick, gray material of her baggy sweatshirt. She wore a pair of bedroom slippers and loose-fitting, dirty-yellow pants that were short enough to reveal her tall brown socks. Her face was plain but pleasant and seemed removed from the mundane consideration of life by the half smile that controlled it. Her unwashed black hair dripped to her shoulders.
She talked quietly to herself and looked around, not at other people but at objects on the ground and on the walls and in the windows of the small shops that lined the street. She seemed delighted by her conversation and occasionally nodded or waved with an easy twist of the wrist. A fine lady gently accentuating some important point.
She appeared happier than the people trying to avoid her. If she’d actually had a companion, looked at some of the people staring at her, or made some effort to clean herself and make herself presentable, I might not have thought she was mad.
When she got close, I spoke. “Anyonghaseiyo.”
She seemed surprised by the interruption. But the small smile quickly regained control of her face and she turned and pointed with her thumb back down the street. “You go?”
I gestured with my head toward Ernie. “We go.”
She looked at both of us and smiled. “No sweat,” she said. We followed her down the street.
About fifty yards past the Starlight Club, she turned off the main road and wound through some mud-floored alleys that got progressively narrower and darker. The stench from the river got harder to take as we went downhill. Finally, she stopped and crouched through a gate in a fence made of rotted wood. The shore of the river lapped listlessly up to within a few feet of the entranceway.
We followed her in. She kicked off her slippers, stepped up on the wooden porch, and slid back the panel leading to her room. She motioned for us to follow.
“Just a minute,” I said. “We wait.”
I sat down on the porch facing the entranceway. Ernie found a wooden stool and pulled it over behind the gate so anyone entering wouldn’t be able to see him. He reached into the pocket of his jacket, pulled out two cans of Falstaff, and tossed one across the courtyard to me. I caught it with two hands, popped the cap, and sucked on the frothing hops.
The River Rat didn’t question us but squatted on her haunches and waited. Just like I’d told her to do.
Ernie settled down on the stool, sipped on his beer, and checked under his jacket. His face calmed as he touched the shoulder holster that held the.45.
The wind gained strength and elbowed its way noisily through the cracks in the old wooden fence. The snow came down with more purpose now and began to stick on the mud, making for a slippery and clammy quagmire.
Just before midnight, I spotted a shadow lumbering along the edge of the river. At the gate, the shadow bent over and filled the entranceway completely for a moment and then popped into the compound.
At first I wasn’t sure if he was human. He looked more like a moving mountain of green canvas. A small fatigue baseball cap balanced atop his big, round head, and two flaming eyes shone out from within glistening folds of black skin. His shoulders were huge and broad enough to be used as workbenches. The arms tapered slightly, like drainage pipes, and as he walked, they worked their way methodically around the gargantuan girth of his torso. The two large sections that were his legs moved alternately toward me.
My throat was suddenly dry. I held my breath and didn’t move. When he got up close, he hovered for a moment, like a storm blotting out the sky, and turned and sat down next to me on the small wooden porch. It shuddered, groaned, and then held. He tilted his red eyes heavenward and took a drink from a small, crystalline bottle that seemed lost in his huge black mitt of a hand. He swallowed, grimaced, and then grinned, first at me and then at Ernie. His teeth were square blocks of yellow chalk, evenly spaced along purple gums.
He growled from deep in his throat. Laughter. And he was quivering with it. “Been waiting for you guys.”
He leaned forward and reached out the bottle to me. Soju. I took it, rubbed the lip with the flat palm of my hand, and drank. I got up and handed it to Ernie. Ernie drank tentatively at first, and then tilted the bottle up quickly and took an audible gulp. He returned the bottle to Bogard, and walked back and leaned against the fence.
The River Rat bounced back and forth to the kitchen, running around as if she were going to prepare some snacks to go with our rice liquor. She mumbled to herself and flitted about, touching Bogard lightly on his back.
He reached out with one huge paw, grabbed her by the shoulder, and sat her down on the porch next to him. She got quiet and stared serenely at us like a schoolgirl waiting for the presentation to begin.
Bogard’s eyes were viciously bloodshot.
“Tell us about Nightmare Range,” I said.
Bogard grunted a half laugh and looked at the ground.
“It was a mistake,” he said. “She shouldn’t have struggled like that.” He looked up at me. “They always want to check you out, you know? Check to see if you got any shit. But by the time she got me checked out, there was no turning back.”
“The clap?”
“No. Chancroid.” It was one of the more popular venereal diseases. “They wouldn’t let me come out of the field to take care of it. Just a little hole in my pecker, nothing serious. She shouldn’t have looked. Then we wouldn’t have this problem.”
“We don’t have a problem,” Ernie said.
Bogard looked up and grinned. “You will.”
I spoke too quickly, trying to pretend that I didn’t understand the threat implied in his answer. “So what happened? You held her down?”