“Look! Up there. On a ledge on the granite cliff.”
Ernie squinted.
“I’ll be damned.”
“It looks like her.”
“Yeah.”
We scrambled toward the cliff and found a pathway leading up. Soon we were climbing above the pines. The moonlight beat down on us, and with the reflection off the smooth granite the sky around us seemed almost as bright as day. The valley below crouched like some dark creature.
The ledge narrowed, and when we rounded a corner, we saw her, sitting atop a large boulder that leaned out into the open air above the abyss.
“Welcome,” she said, “to the realm of the Goddess of the Moon.”
She waved her hand at us.
“No. Don’t come any closer. You will be severely punished if you do.” She held a jade tumbler no larger than a small wine carafe up into the moonlight. “I will deny you the Elixir of Immortality.”
She lowered the tumbler into her lap and laughed softly.
“It’s the same formula Lao-tze took before passing beyond the Gates of the Western Mountains into the land of the immortals. It has taken me years to perfect it. I wanted my sister to take it but she was of small mind, so instead I challenged her boyfriend, the young American, to try it. He was very bold. Or maybe it was the rice wine he had consumed with the brazen ladies of Ok-dong. But whatever the reason, he grabbed it out of my hand and poured it straight down his throat.”
She lowered her eyes. “I suppose he wasn’t ready for it.” She glanced back up at us and laughed. “To follow the path of the Tao takes years of preparation. I saw you consulting with him in the turnip patch. I’m afraid he’s not too talkative now. My sister couldn’t get him to say a word, and when she couldn’t, she seemed frightened of him and ran away down the mountain. I was happy when I learned that she had found a way of transcending her troubles. Maybe she was, after all, wiser than I thought.”
She held the tumbler out toward Ernie.
“Will you have some? You seem like one who is wise enough in the ways of the Tao to sample the Jade Elixir. You will have immortality! No? No matter.”
She raised the tumbler high above her head.
“To the Goddess of the Moon!”
As she opened her mouth and started to pour I ran forward, but the boulder was slippery and my leather shoes found no traction. Ernie was behind me and cupped his hands for my feet, and I slid up and over the curved surface. As I reached for her, she poured the last of the green fluid into her mouth. A violent eruption convulsed her stomach. I expected vomit to explode out of her mouth but instead she seemed to choke and then she dropped the tumbler and clenched her throat and the jade container clattered along the side of the cliff until it crashed into the rocks below.
Ernie pushed again, but this time I found a handhold and resisted. I didn’t want to go sliding over the far edge of the rock.
The nun stood and looked down at me, her face green, her throat shriveled up like a dried stick of bamboo, her eyes wide in terror. A croaking noise erupted from her open mouth and she stepped backward and her foot slipped. As I reached out, her hand slapped mine and slid off my fingers, and she vaulted into the black night, twirling end over end until her skull smashed into the rock below, cracking like a moist melon.
I lay still, clinging to the rock for a long time until Ernie pulled me off the precipice.
On the way back to Ok-dong long clouds skittered in front of the silver face of the moon, wavering in the wind, like silk streamers trailing after the Moon Goddess.
SEOUL MOURNING
Staff Sergeant Riley, the Admin NCO at the Criminal Investigation Detachment, plopped the big folder into my hands and somehow managed to smirk around buck teeth. Dark hair slicked back, so skinny he seemed to rattle inside his starched fatigue shirt, he pulled a pencil from behind his ear and tapped the eraser on the folder.
“SOFA case,” he said. “Hot. For you and Ernie.”
SOFA. A military acronym that stands for the Status of Forces Agreement. The treaty between Korea and the US that covers everything from criminal jurisdiction over military personnel to the prohibition on selling imported maraschino cherries down in the village.
“SOFA case?” I always have something clever to say when I’m getting screwed. “How’d me and Ernie get it?”
“Top figures you’ve been goofing off on the black market detail long enough. Besides, this thing is such a pile of manure that nobody else wants it.”
He thumbed through the folder and pulled out a carbon-backed invoice. Five thousand bucks. To be delivered, in cash, to the family of Choi Un-suk, the little girl referred to in all the reports as “the victim.”
Riley marched back to his desk and sat down, his gravelly voice rolling over a barricade of paper-clipped reports.
“The first sergeant wants it taken care of,” he said. “Now!”
Tonight, after a couple of shots of bourbon, Riley’d be the sweetest guy in the world. At work he was a bear.
Arguing about an assignment once the decision had been made would be a waste of everybody’s time. Instead, I found a corner, sat down in a gray military chair, and thumbed through the folder.
The title of the report was Serious Traffic Incident, which was a hell of an understatement. An American army jeep, traveling south on the Main Supply Route between Camp Red Cloud in Uijongbu and Yongsan Compound in Seoul, managed to kill a young girl, Choi Un-suk, age thirteen, a student at the Kuk-min Middle School.
It didn’t run her over. According to one of the GI passengers, the driver, Private First Class Dwayne Ortfield, had been speeding and swerving through traffic the entire trip. The ten-foot antenna, bent forward from the radio in the back, hadn’t been properly secured. The front portion whipped from side to side. When he and the other two passengers complained, PFC Ortfield ignored them and kept driving at a high rate of speed.
It was at a bus stop, crammed with black-suited children on their way to school, that PFC Ortfield tried to pass a taxicab on the right. One of the girls, the safety monitor, stood slightly off the curb. When she saw PFC Ortfield heading toward her, she turned, raised her white-gloved hand, and blew her whistle. Ortfield swerved away, but the antenna, obeying the immutable laws of physics, didn’t follow.
The tip of the antenna jammed into the little girl’s eyeball, pierced her brain, and splattered half her skull over her screaming schoolmates.
Private Ortfield didn’t want to stop, but after being punched by his passengers, he went back, supposedly to do what he could to help.
They were forced to leave, however, because a mob formed before the arrival of the Korean National Police and the GIs in the jeep would have been, in all probability, torn limb from limb.
Ortfield had a long history of traffic violations. But his MOS, his Military Occupational Specialty, was 64 Charlie, transportation. When he first joined up, he had been designated as a driver by the army, and despite the proofs of his incompetence, a driver he had remained. Until this.
The Korean National Police turned jurisdiction over to US military authorities. The theory was that since he was army, let the army take care of him. Besides, we give their government millions of dollars in assistance each year. No one wants to cause hard feelings. American GIs are only sent to Korean courts when public outrage demands it. This was a small case, not well covered by the press. No outrage. Not yet.
The court-martial was scheduled for this morning at the 8th Army judge advocate general’s office.
Meanwhile, the family had filed a wrongful death claim with the United States government under the provisions of the Status of Forces Agreement. It had been approved. An easy way out of the mess for our side. Five thousand bucks. A tiny globule of wealth siphoned from a sea of taxpayer money.