“That’s my wife,” Singletery said, but he didn’t attempt any more formal introductions.
We slipped off our shoes and stepped up on the porch and Mrs. Singletery dealt flat cushions out on the floor. The room had sleeping mats rolled against one wall and a large inlaid mother-of-pearl armoire against the other. She folded down the legs of a small table, set it in front of us, and hurried out toward the kitchen. Singletery, after slipping off his combat boots, sat down opposite us. With moist brown eyes he stared at us, his legs comfortably crossed, his big hands relaxed in his lap. He didn’t say anything. Neither did we. We just listened to the bang, slap, roar of the cartoon next door. The children were enraptured but they weren’t laughing.
Finally, Singletery’s wife brought a brass pot of hot water and we helped ourselves to Folgers instant coffee. Ernie took sugar in his, I took mine black. Singletery sipped on a strawberry soda.
The cartoons ended. The children filed out of the room, slipped on their shoes, and bowed to Singletery’s wife, who stood on the porch to see them off. In a small pack they trotted across the courtyard, pushed through the gate, and tumbled shouting out into the street. A little boy of about four came over and sat in Singletery’s lap. He was obviously his son, with both the dark skin and curly hair of his father and the smooth Korean features of his mother.
“The wife likes the kids to play here,” Singletery said. “That’s why she lets ’em watch TV.”
Many of the poor families in Sonyu-ri, and throughout the country, could not afford televisions.
“That’s nice of her,” I said.
Singletery didn’t answer. He held the bottle of pop while his son drank from it. His wife didn’t join us. A pot clanged in the kitchen.
Ernie and I already figured we were in the wrong place. The likelihood of this guy, a lifer with well over ten years in the Army, traveling to Seoul with a couple of buddies and raping a business girl on the banks of the Han River were slim to non-existent. Still, we were here. Might as well ask some questions.
“Your boys seem a little over-exuberant,” I said.
Singletery stared at me blankly.
“They’re anxious to kick some REMF ass,” Ernie translated.
Singletery smiled, brown eyes shining. “They some tough boys.”
“In your platoon?”
“In my battery,” he corrected.
“Right. Your battery. Do you get down to Seoul much?”
“Every payday,” he said proudly.
“Get a kitchen pass?” Ernie said, smiling. “So you can run the ville down in Itaewon?”
Somberly, Singletery shook his head. His son was growing bored with our adult conversation, his eyes drooping. He snuggled up closer to his dad. “No,” Singletery replied. “Every payday me and the wife and the boy jump on the bus out of RC-Four. Go to the commissary.”
He was referring to 8th Army’s big Yongsan Commissary in Seoul. Whole families from the Division area mob the place shortly after end-of-month payday, and mob the free military buses going back and forth. Most of them carry empty Army-issue duffel bags down with them, then load them up with imported merchandize and lug the heavy load all the way back up north.
“How about last weekend?” Ernie asked. “Did you or anybody in your unit go to Seoul?”
Singletery shook his head. “We was out on alert.”
“Where?”
“Nightmare Range.”
I knew where it was. A military reservation set aside for war games, at the top of the Eastern Corridor, sandwiched between the Imjin River and the Demilitarized Zone.
“The whole battalion?” I asked.
Singletery nodded his head.
That was that. We’d checked on every Chief of Firing Battery in the entire 2nd Infantry Division, every NCO who could conceivably be called “Smoke,” and we’d come up with nothing. Still, Singletery had been living and working in the Division area for over five years. I decided to level with him.
“There was a rape,” I said, “down in Seoul. A business girl named Sunny was hurt badly.”
Singletery patted his son on the butt and told him to run off to his mother. The sleepy boy did. Singletery sipped on his strawberry soda and studied me with his brown eyes. I filled him in on the details and told him that we were up here because one of Sunny’s attackers had been referred to as “Smoke.”
“Smoke,” Singletery repeated.
“So we thought,” Ernie said, “that the guy might be a Chief of Firing Battery.”
“Have you heard anything?” I asked. “About three guys going to Seoul last weekend, maybe one of them coming back with some scratches on his face or on his arms? Maybe bragging about the women they’d met? Something like that?”
Slowly, Singletery shook his head. He set down his soda. “That’s fucked up,” he said.
“Yes,” I replied. “Very fucked up.”
He shoved his soda away, as if it had turned sour. His wife returned and offered us more coffee. We declined. Singletery continued to think about what we’d said, as if we’d upset him deeply. When he offered no further information, we thanked him and his wife for their hospitality, went to the porch, slipped on our shoes, and escaped into the cold night.
A thousand lights reflected off the rotating glass disc. Rock and roll blared out of the juke box and I had to lean close to Ernie to make myself heard.
“We should drive back tonight,” I shouted. “Make some more black market arrests in the morning.”
“Why?” Ernie asked. “Five arrests in two days. That’s enough to hold ’em for a while.”
“Not with Mrs. Wrypointe on the warpath.”
“Screw Mrs. Wrypointe.”
“Not with your dick,” I told him, although my heart wasn’t in it. Ernie’d glommed onto a buxom young woman wearing hot pants and a halter top. Her name was Miss Kim or Miss Lee or Miss Pak, I don’t remember which, and when the midnight curfew approached Ernie told me that he’d be staying with her at her hooch and he’d meet me in the morning.
“Where?” I asked.
“At the jeep. There’s a PX snack stand in front of the Battalion Ops Center. Zero eight hundred.”
“That late?”
“You worry too much, Sueño.”
Patting Miss Kim or Miss Lee or Miss Pak on her tight butt, he strode out the back door of the Kit Kat Club and entered the dark maze of alleys that pulsed through the village of Sonyu-ri like purple veins through a heart.
I finished my beer and wandered out into the street. Standing in shadow, I watched GIs, many of them arm-in-arm with business girls, scattering toward refuge before the oncoming midnight-to-four curfew. Lights in many of the shops had already been turned off, metal shutters rolled into place. Up and down the strip, neon flickered, buzzed, and then shut down.
A woman stood next to me. “We go, GI?”
She was older than me. In her thirties, maybe forty. I couldn’t stand here all night. I asked her how much. She told me. It seemed reasonable.
She was surprised, I suppose, that I didn’t bargain. Most GIs would. But I didn’t believe in bargaining with business girls. They were desperate and only did what they did because of poverty. I knew about desperation and I knew about poverty. But these days I had money coming in every month, whether I needed it or not. And I had no wife to spend it on, and no son. Not that I could find, anyway.
She took me by the hand and her flesh was warm. I held on tight as she led me into the night.
In the morning, I was up with the PT formations. PT-that’s the army’s acronym for physical training. Or, as drill sergeants love to say, “physical torture.” Before dawn, each unit falls out in the company (or battery) street and does the daily dozen. Calisthenics, civilians call them. Jumping jacks, squat benders, leg thrusts, push-ups, sit-ups, the usual. When done with that, the next order of business is the morning run. Years ago, a mile was deemed to be an appropriate distance. But these days, longer distances are in vogue and no self-respecting firing battery would bother with a run of less than two miles. Each of the three Camp Pelham firing batteries exploded, in formation, yelling their lungs out, from beneath the arched main gate. An NCO led them, shouting out cadence, the men chanting in response, and the unit wound like a very noisy caterpillar down the main street of Sonyu-ri. “Wake up! Sonyu-ri! Wake up! Sonyu-ri!”