“Did he have short hair?” I asked. They nodded. “And a Korean woman with him?” They nodded again.
“She became very upset and left after only about an hour.”
“He stayed here alone?”
“Not alone!” They all laughed at this. “He had us to keep him company.”
“He spent the whole night?”
“Not the whole night. After a while he left with the Moon Goddess.”
I asked her what she meant by that, but they all giggled. Ernie was horsing around with the other girls and making them laugh and somebody turned the music up louder so I couldn’t talk anyway. After a few more shots of rice wine I figured it must be one of those obscure Korean literary allusions. I tried to forget about the investigation. It was clear what had happened. The boyfriend, like any red-blooded Marine, had forgotten his little girlfriend from Songtan when he’d encountered the beautiful courtesans of White Cloud Mountain. She had lost much face and left on her own. Maybe she was crazy, like her sister, or intense to the point of madness, like her father. For whatever reason, she couldn’t take her first amorous rejection, and she returned to Songtan and did her job like the well-trained child of Confucius that she was, and when the night closed around her, she went to the railroad tracks and waited for the train and walked out in front of the whistle and the clanging and the barreling light.
I tried to put these thoughts out of my mind and laugh along with Ernie and the girls. At first I couldn’t, but after a few more shots of soju I managed.
One of the girls slipped something into my hand. It was a temporary ration card issued by the Osan Ration Control Office. She pouted.
“He said he would give me more money later, when he comes back, and he gave me this.” The temporary card was only good for a month, and on his next trip to Korea he’d easily be able to get another. I shook my head.
“It’s not worth much.”
She sighed. “You keep it then. Are all GIs big liars?”
I nodded somberly and put the card in my pocket. The name on it was typed neatly. Faulkner, Robert R.
Korean has no letter for F, so a hard P is usually substituted. The letters L and R are interchangeable and sometimes dropped. “Pok-no” was a reasonable good transliteration of the name Faulkner.
More food and more rice wine were brought out. Korean men entered the shop, and some of the girls drifted off toward them. Everyone seemed quite happy to see Americans in such an out of the way place, as if we confirmed that White Cloud Mountain was a spot well worth visiting. The night turned out to be a great success, Ernie was in a rage of blissfulness, and the ladies of Ok-dong were all they promised they’d be.
We didn’t leave until morning.
At the Osan provost marshal’s office the next day we had the teletype operation transmit a message to Iwakuni Air Force Base in Okinawa with the names of the three Marines. While we waited for the response, we went to the snack bar and loaded up on fried eggs and bacon and hash browns.
“Could you believe those chicks last night?” Ernie asked.
“They’ve never talked to Americans before,” I said. “We were a novelty.”
“Damn. If it’d been any more of a novelty, they would’ve killed me.” He sipped on his coffee. “So we recommend approval of the claim, huh?”
“I don’t see why not. Another case of a GI’s gonads guiding his common sense.”
“Understandable.”
“Yeah.”
After breakfast, we still had more time to kill, so we stopped at the base library. I found a book on Taoist cosmology and found out that the Jade Emperor was indeed considered to be the supreme god of the universe. His powers were somewhat limited, however, since the Tao itself, the inexplicable principles that rule existence, cannot be broken but only followed, even by gods of immense power.
His-wang-mo, the Goddess of the Moon and the dispenser of the elixir of immortality, was a little more to my liking. A beautiful woman, she was changeable like the moon itself, and as such she was the goddess of the seasons and the weather and of all things that were always in flux-which seemed like everything to me. An engraving in the book looked much like the second shrine we had seen in the little hut on White Cloud Mountain.
In a book on Korean rhetoric, I couldn’t find any reference to a saying like “leaving with the Moon Goddess.” I asked the Korean librarian, but she had never heard of it. I wrote it off as just the mutterings of a bunch of party girls.
When we returned to the Osan PMO, the transmission was waiting for us. Jordan and Thompson had been located easily. The problem was that Lance Corporal Robert R. Faulkner had not yet returned to Okinawa and was being carried by his unit as absent without leave. They told us that if we found him we should arrest him-and send him back under armed guard.
The evidence was too thin to involve the Korean police, so Ernie and I strode resolutely past the police station through the main street of Ok-dong without stopping and, even though the shadows of the pines were growing longer, hiked up the side of White Cloud Mountain.
When we crossed the crest that led to the Temple of the Jade Emperor, I shouted, but no one emerged from the rickety hut. We checked inside. Empty.
Ernie kicked around in the turnip patch until he came upon a rectangular clump of fresh black soil. He searched behind the hut and found a shovel, and we started to dig.
The Temple of the Jade Emperor was also a shrine to the Moon Goddess, and it wasn’t too surprising that the girls of the Ok-dong soju house called the crazy woman who tended the shrine the Moon Goddess. After her humiliation, it was only natural that Miss Won would’ve returned up here to her sister’s hut and told her about the betrayal by her American boyfriend.
Won Un-suk had told us that after her sister left with her boyfriend that night she had never seen her again. Maybe she was lying. Or maybe she meant it in a spiritual sense: she had never again seen the innocent person who had once been her sister.
The concerned nun might’ve gone into the village herself to talk to the wayward young man. Had she brought him back up here? Maybe they’d talked. What had happened then I didn’t know, but I did know that Faulkner had never made it back to Osan in time to catch his flight to Okinawa.
The jolt in Ernie’s shovel answered the question.
We bent down and scraped away the dirt. As flesh came into view, we did our best to hold our breath to protect ourselves from the rotten odor.
We cleared away more of the earth. In the fading light of sunset his skin seemed to have a green pallor, but it was the stomach that startled us most. Ernie jumped back, and we peered down into the pit.
“Looks like he swallowed a damned bowling ball,” Ernie said. “I’ve never seen a stomach so distended.”
“What could it have been?”
“I don’t have any idea.”
We threw a couple of feet of dirt back on the body and went into the hut to wait. Ernie watched out the window on one side, I watched out the other. Three hours later large black clouds rolled in but scurried away, as if anxious to flee the neighborhood.
“I’m not going to sit up here all night,” Ernie said. “What we do is we go back down the mountain, report it, get a team up here to exhume the body, and we’re through.”
“But she might slip away.”
“She’s already gone.”
I sighed. “You’re probably right.”
We walked outside the hut. Another cloud rolled away and the face of the full moon glimmered down on the turnip patch.
“The Moon Goddess is watching,” I said.
“Knock that crap off,” Ernie replied.
We started down the path.
At the first bend in the trail the moonlight lit up a granite cliff in front of us almost as brightly as the white screen of a drive-in movie. I hadn’t noticed it on the way up because our backs were to it, and in the light of day it would just be another rock. Something darted across the cliff. I grabbed Ernie’s arm.