Lark and Termite Page 3

  “Musician,” Colonel MacDowell had said, jerking his head in Leavitt’s direction.

  The four-month language-immersion course in Seoul was MacDowell’s idea. He’d personally selected candidates from the Occupation force in Tokyo and presented each one to Colonel Wright the first day with a short declaration. MacDowell spoke pidgin Korean but had higher hopes for Leavitt and the others.

  “Tonal familiarity,” he explained over Wright’s desk, “auditory sophistication.”

  Wright nodded, clipped, efficient. “Your instrument, soldier?”

  “Trumpet, sir,” Leavitt replied.

  MacDowell slapped Leavitt on the shoulder like a jovial fan. “Heard this boy at the Match Box Officers’ Club, in Tokyo. Been there a month and got himself into a band. I collared him, first night.”

  “So I hear,” Colonel Wright replied, as though the sessions at the Match Box were famous. “At ease, son.” He addressed MacDowell. “You bring the whole group over, Mac?”

  “Offered to. Leavitt here and one other soldier took me up on it. A drummer, I believe. Tompkins, wasn’t it, Leavitt?”

  “Tompkins, sir.” Nothing tonal about Tompkins—as a musician, he was all instinct, strength, endurance—but Leavitt supposed Language Immersion Seoul was an experiment open to anyone MacDowell wanted to pull in. He’d also posted calls for those with aptitude in mathematics.

  “You’ll do well, both of you,” MacDowell said, “and I wouldn’t be surprised if you get yourself another band together here—a good many of the boys are musicians.” He went on to explain that the South Korean instructors were already formulating a higher-level course for those who showed “exemplary aptitude.”

  Standing there in Wright’s office at KMAG, Leavitt allowed himself to fantasize speaking Korean and playing jazz for the rest of his overseas rotation, but the North Koreans, as it turned out, weren’t posturing. The invasion was well-planned extended ambush, dress-rehearsed at Kaesong. Now Leavitt holds a dull conviction that Korea is the beginning of an ending Hiroshima and Nagasaki only faked.

  Along with her pen-and-ink sketches of him, of rooftops out their window, Lola had taped magazine pictures on the wall by her bureau. One was a Life magazine full-page color image of a mushroom cloud. Look at it: the death flower. The biggest hottest flower anybody ever died inside. Die inside you, he’d whisper, inside you. Many of her tacked-up drawings were façades of buildings or bridges in the West Virginia town she’d left and said she never wanted to see again. Surfaces. Shape of a scrubby island off a riverbank, stone arches of a bridge. Signs: a MURPHY’S FIVE AND TEN CENT STORE sign in letters curlicued and bold like a circus might use to spell its name. Walking beside railroad tracks in Chungchong Province, policing this hurried flight, he imagines the images he saw from Lola’s bed. Her sketches were never in color. They were grainy no. 2 pencil, shades ranging almost black to silver, pressed deep into rag paper whose first layer was nearly scratched away. At certain points of contrast, the white left extant seemed to glow in the dark.

  Trying to remember is a game he plays during the endless days and at night when he’s not on watch and sleep is never sleep. If he can put the images in their places, find them on the walls, he might call back the room itself and lie down in it and wait for her.

  He doesn’t lie down, ever. Sleeping, he props himself upright, ready to jump to his feet. American forces have fallen back seventy miles in seventeen days, no Intelligence involved; they stand, hold, and fall back, ever more decimated. Korea has dropped its mask and filled Leavitt’s head with pictures, sounds, words he’s heard before and words he’s never heard; signals whose crossed lines pass through him in phantom frequencies. You’re the best, babe, the only one—there, right there, babe? Baby? Baby? Remembering Lola’s voice, Leavitt tenses as he walks. He’d listen for baby or Bobby or love or babe or simply yes: one pulsing word rapidly repeated; her breathy, questioning intonations timed to each thrust were a signal she was nearly there. Sounds that were no longer words meant he could let go and stop thinking, pound in hard just where she’d put him inside her. No woman he’d ever been with responded so strongly, so unmistakably, the spasm of her muscles a deep interior rippling that touched off his own wrenching orgasm. Lying still afterward, completely drained, unable to lift his hips, his head, he could move his fingers inside her and play her sensation like a thing he actually controlled.

  The week she told him about the baby, the week before he’d shipped out, they thought he’d be gone a year, doing his time in Occupied Japan. He’d come back to her, to the baby. He’d even hoped, after he arrived in Korea, that specialized status in LIS might help him secure a leave when the baby was born. Lola planned to convince the right people she was in such bad shape that a leave for her husband was advisable. She could be convincing, and old man Onslow had connections; one hand scratched the other in the Kentucky lowlands of Onslow County. Onslow was a fallen Louisville blue blood whose family name graced the county courthouse, and his club filled a definite need at nearby Fort Knox, a straight shot down Highway 31. Onslow knew people and was kin to half of city government; he depended on Lola to keep his girls clean and well advised while he ran sex for soldiers as a sideline business. He’d done numerous favors for the brass at the base, hushing up soldiers’ messes, meeting their particularities with understanding. He shared his windfalls with Lola as though she were his blood or his business partner, or maybe just to buy her silence. Lola was unpredictable—she didn’t live under anyone’s thumb, including Onslow’s. He seemed to approve of Lola’s alliance, probably saw Leavitt as keeping her happy before conveniently disappearing overseas. He didn’t know they had plans until they married, two weeks before Leavitt left. Even then he seemed to assume Leavitt might not reappear, might come to his senses far from Fort Knox and the complications of marriage to a woman like Lola. The baby was proof to the contrary; Leavitt was alive inside her. She’d already talked to a doc who frequented the club; he’d swear she was nearly dead after the birth. The army would ship Bobby back for an emergency leave; he’d do a few more months abroad, and then his rotation would be over; they’d decide together whether he stayed in the military or mustered out.

  It’s laughable now, their plans and schemes. No one is getting out of Korea, not for years. The “specialized” soldiers of Language Immersion Seoul are leading platoons and evacuating villages, shouting orders and instructions. Terrified South Koreans address Leavitt in fast, complex streams of language he can’t understand against a backdrop of artillery and flight. Ihae mot haeyo, he repeats, I don’t understand. Ijjokuro: this way. Hurry. No: naeil. Jigum: now.

  All month he’s carried a snapshot of Lola in the breast pocket of his stinking fatigues, wrapped in a cellophane-encased cigarette pack against the rain: Lola in the hammock they’d strung on the third-floor porch off her room. Even in black and white, her dark red hair looks red, and her eyes look blue, the pretty lines at the corners a little deeper. She rests one hand on her rounded belly, her smile languid and sweet, like she’s about to pour him a glass of that minted tea she spikes with a little rum. This morning when the platoon hurriedly pulled out, the new replacements stumbling and nervous, Leavitt missed the carefully flattened cigarette pack and Lola’s picture. Losing it was bad luck. On the back she’d written Seven months along. He will be hearing any day. It could be happening. It might have started. She’d knocked off the juice, she said, and even the cigarettes, could he believe it? She still sang weekends, sitting primly draped behind the piano in the silk kimono he’d sent her from Tokyo. At the end of the set she’d slip it off and stand up in a dress cut simple as any Mrs. Brown’s jumper, but black and sequined, clinging tight across her breasts and swollen front, and her shape inspired wild applause. That was Lola, never who you thought she was, inspiring hordes of boys to whom she was off-limits. Why had she let him upstairs that night, years after she said she’d stopped with men—she had her girls to love her and packed roomfuls of boys to fend off. Some
thing about the quality of your attention, she told him, and the fact you’re a solid musician. Two flights of narrow stairwell to her room, each dim landing a turn farther into silence, until they might have been stepping into space.

  Louisville was hopping now, she said, full of green Fort Knox recruits and basic-hardened boys hot to knock hell out of this tiny little war. Enough, she wanted to leave as soon as he got back. Florida, she’d written him, Coral Gables. She’d picked the town based on the name alone and the fact it bordered the sea. They’d buy a cottage first, then something bigger. Run a little tourist home, she’d said in her letters, a guesthouse. There were always vacationers on budgets and big-city tourists tired of the cold. She was saving all she could. I can be respectable, if I’m not run out of town for corrupting a minor. He’s no minor. He was twenty-one when they married; she was twenty-nine. Jesus, she was wild about him, with a hunger like a man’s. He’s glad about the baby; he’s put his mark on her, held his territory until he can get back and claim her. He thinks about her with other men, in a past before he knew her, and blocks images out of his mind. He never asked how she smoothed arrangements with a character like Onslow. Lola has a past and a kid, a daughter who lives with her older sister in West Virginia. The sister manages a restaurant, pays a mortgage on her own house. Noreen was the strong one, Lola said, and nobody’s fool. It was better. Leavitt imagines an ultra-respectable schoolmarm type, kindly enough to raise Lola’s daughter while she disapproves of singers and bars and military towns, disapproves of Lola, no doubt. Lola sends money every month and keeps a picture tucked into her mirror: a school picture the size of a big postage stamp. Skinny kid, serious and pale, like Lola without the auburn hair and smatter of freckles across her cheekbones. Lola wouldn’t say her daughter’s name, even to him. I gave her a bird’s name. Maybe she’ll grow up safe and fly away. There were other small pictures clipped together in her drawer, one each year since the daughter was three and went to live with the aunt. Lola never showed him, never looked at them, only kept the newest one where she saw it every time she looked at herself.

  When he asked about the kid’s father, Lola was silent. But who the hell was he, had she loved him like this, like them, their room, their bed? God no. He was a sleepy sort, she’d had to walk him through it like a brother. Served his purpose and back where he came from, good riddance. “Ah, you mountain folk,” Leavitt said and touched her, “fuck your brothers and nothing to it.”

  “Yeah, sure,” she said, “and I’ve got one leg shorter than the other, and no one in West Virginia has ever stood on level ground or worn shoes.”

  “Nobody’s your brother,” he told her. He moved her under him, looked at her, licked her eyes, touched her hairline with his tongue. “Nobody, remember it.”

  “You’re my brother,” she’d answered, breathing. “You’re the first and the last. After you, there’s no one.”

  He believed her. He didn’t ask if Coral Gables was a reunification fantasy, divided factions drawn together beside the sea. Coral Gables was a beach town near Miami, Tompkins said, near Hialeah, where the horses ran. If Leavitt can get out of Korea, a daughter is fine with him. In Florida, he’d know her name.

  Rural hamlets here are derivations of one another, dirt track villages of shabby wooden buildings. Leavitt has scribbled the similar romanized names of the villages emptied today in his dirty, palm-sized notebook: Chu Gok Ri, No Gun Ri, Im Ke Ri. No plumbing, no electricity. What did the refugees carry in those bundles on their backs and heads, what did they gather up when the soldiers appeared, rousting them out before the North Koreans swept through? Intelligence warned some carried ordnance and mortars to North Korean units. If they did, Leavitt thought, they were North Korean infiltrators. He’d heard South Koreans speak among themselves and understood enough to know that most of them hated the North. Whole villages emptied at news the NKPA were closing in; they were considered bloodthirsty puppets of the Red Chinese, and their readiness to slaughter civilians was legendary. Remaining ROK units couldn’t be trusted with the few North Korean prisoners they’d taken; they shot them outright. Still, both sides took advantage of the American inability to tell them apart unless they were uniformed. Leavitt takes off his helmet, wipes the sweat from his face without breaking stride. Ijjokuro, he calls to the Koreans, this way.

  Leavitt turns to sight Tompkins far to the rear. They’re reunited, Tompkins says, together in hell. Now Leavitt wonders if they’re meant to die together. Or if Tompkins will survive and be the one to find him. He made Tompkins take Lola’s address and a letter for her; Tompkins didn’t reciprocate. There was no one but his mother, he said, and notification plans were bad luck. Death was dead, not a good way to get out. Getting out was good though; they needed to get out. “Keep your ass in my sights,” Tompkins liked to tell him, “I’ll get you out.” He said he’d know Leavitt’s ass anywhere, and he’d haul out whatever was left of it or die trying. Then he’d wink. “Feel like getting out?” he’d ask. Where were the girls from Tompkins’ preferred brothel now? Dead or running. Running, Tompkins said, they’d got out. No doubt, the girls were way south, waiting for Tompkins to catch up. But he couldn’t, not yet. “She whaled me good,” he reminisced sadly of his favorite, “my lucky star.”

  This morning at dawn, Tompkins had been matter-of-fact. “Definitely,” he intoned, “gonna get out today. Wanna talk about it?”

  Leavitt deadpanned his stock response: “We can talk about it.” Like a charm, a set dialogue.

  “Ain’t no talk,” Tompkins insisted. “Out we go. Today’s the day.”

  The double railroad overpass is closer now; Leavitt can see that the tunnels below are slightly curved and relatively deep; he can’t see through them. The dirt road moves through one into dark shade, the stream through the other. They’re stone or concrete, bunkerlike, arched, like two deep eyes angled slightly askance. He’ll keep the Koreans on the tracks as long as possible, then direct them down the grassy incline to rest in the shade of the tunnels while Tompkins radios command. They’ll advise the refugees to proceed south on their own, circle the men back to regroup, reduce chances the platoons will be stranded or cut off.

  “Towajuseyo!” A girl stands full in front of Leavitt, blocking his path, burdened by the nearly grown child on her back. She fills his vision, shocking and sudden. “Towajuseyo!” she says again, and repeats, “ Towajuseyo!”‘Help me. Please help me.

  It’s a demand, not a request. For a moment he wonders if he knows her, one of the girls from Seoul. Had she danced for him while he held himself apart, while he kept himself from her until she remembered who she was? But no, this one is a village girl, beautiful, petite like most of them, dressed in the usual white garments, a purely rural girl who has never been to Seoul. She’s the incarnation of those ritual dances whores never forgot, and she is angry, unafraid. She seems as furious as Leavitt feels, as they should all feel, walking away like this, losing everything. Frantically, she gestures toward the tracks. An old woman has fallen or maybe just collapsed. Halmoni! she says, Halmoni! Not her mother; it’s the word for grandmother or great-aunt. The girl runs back to stand over her, looks at Leavitt, pleads with him angrily as though it’s his job to help only her. This girl has never left her village. She’s forgotten nothing and is fiercely herself: she’s the child’s guardian, the old woman’s protector, and she stands legs outspread, one arm flung out, planted to provide the old woman a barrier. The crowd in white—all of them, these farmers, wear white—parts around her, barely disturbed, moving on. She glares at Leavitt, enraged that she needs help, angry at herself. She can’t carry the boy on her back and pick up the old woman, yet she won’t put the boy down, not here, even for a moment.

  Monitor, do not assist. Those are his orders, repeated to his men just hours ago as this venture started. Where is fucking Tompkins? He has the radio. Leavitt looks to his left to see Tompkins a hundred feet back. Leavitt’s whistle rends the air, signaling the platoon to tighten along the perimet
er of the refugee column; they are to stay to the left of the tracks where they can see one another. Keep everyone moving.

  Leavitt looks at the old woman, at the girl. She stands, unbending, staring at him, waiting, holding the child. The boy tilts his head oddly. Too old to be carried, he’s crippled, slow-witted, something. Leavitt nods at the girl, yes, and dread breaks over him. Something imminent approaches, something to hurt them all, carry them away. Is it her? Someone in the crowd? Unlikely an infiltrator would attack here unless the crowd was full of them. Infiltrators typically moved singly, regrouped in the foothills, circled in behind advancing American forces big enough to be worth the trouble. The girl looks at Leavitt, willing him closer. Her eyes burn into him, her perfectly oval face nearly opalescent. She could be the kid’s mother or his sister, who could tell, the women here all look so young until they are suddenly ancient. Leavitt steps back to sight his men down the line, staggered shapes in fatigues, then he wades quickly into the crowd. As though on signal, the girl reaches out, shifts the burden of the child to him, and bends over the old woman. Stronger than she looks, she lifts the old lady to her feet and half supports her, moving on as though Leavitt will simply follow. He nearly does, but reaches out to touch her shoulder. Kujjokuro, he shouts; to the side, move to the side, out of the flow of the crowd. The kid’s legs circle Leavitt’s waist; he shifts his carbine to one shoulder and clasps the boy to his hip. Bikyuh, he says calmly, out.

  The girl needs no further direction; she stays close and follows Leavitt, urging the old woman along. The boy weighs nothing. He must be eight, nine. The grip of his thin arms is firm, the aspect of his upper body wholly tense. He moves his head, listening, the curved shell of his ear turned up. Their faces are inches apart. Leavitt sees into the boy’s stunning, nearly reflective eyes: the obsidian irises float a pale blue milk and his pupils are invisible behind blue splashes of cataract. He’s blind. That’s why the girl wouldn’t put him down. The cloudiness in his eyes seems to subtly pulse or dilate; the boy looks with complete attention, seems to see past Leavitt or into him. He’s not slow, or not exactly; he seems preternaturally alert. Leavitt has difficulty looking away but averts his eyes and quickens his pace through the crowd. He feels the girl’s frantic hand on his lower back and slows just enough to accommodate her struggling progress with the old woman. “Follow me,” he calls to her in Korean, “stay with me.” Moving quickly, edging through, he feels the boy’s small body go rigid, his apprehension heighten to a nearly audible pitch; Leavitt imagines the clear, high tone of a tuning fork struck in midair. It’s that kind of focus, emotionless and pure, so sharply true that nothing else exists. Suddenly he understands, and he hears what the boy hears. Planes. Thrumming overhead, closing fast. There’s no way out. The refugees move doggedly forward. Perfectly exposed, they’re a white column seemingly moving in formation, and the strafing begins.