Lark and Termite (3 page)

A streambed and culvert along the opposite side of the railroad tracks run with trickling water; the Koreans seem to think it’s drinkable water, but Leavitt calls to them not to pause.
Gaesok kaseyo!
Keep going. Sounds of artillery fire drift closer as he squints into the tracks. The land deepens; ahead the tracks pass levelly across broad, matching concrete bridges; identical tunnels under the bridges span a stream and a dirt road. He’ll halt the column there, let them drink and rest in the cool of the tunnels, radio command. Tompkins has the radio. Typically they stay in sight of one another, but the new troops are so raw that Leavitt walks point and Tompkins brings up the rear, mom-and-pop style, in case they’re fired upon. The refugees move forward in near silence; they walk steadily along the tracks through muddy, saturated land. Far off the foothills steepen, forested and green, against a broad horizon so impenetrable it looks painted against the sky. The land is oppressive, ancient, dominant, cultivated in small patches, borrowed for scant lifetimes of subsistence farming. Lifetimes on the move now, blinks of an eye. Whole villages emptied out, moving, frightened populations, imported armies— none of it matters. Generations of political animosity and serial foreign occupation are passing weather, and the hulking mountains watch. NKPA controls those mountains, that sky. Leavitt warned his men at dawn to stay close, stay tight. Now he pulls in the straggling platoon with shrill, aptly timed whistles, accompanied in his head by Lola’s words, private sounds soft with darkness.
Baby? You tired? Come here, baby.
He’s past tired. There’s no tired, just a tight-strung, alert exhaustion fueled by watchful fear and barely controlled rage. Pressed and pressed, falling back in panicked or slow retreat, they’re outnumbered and little supported, fingers in the fucking dike. Fear and anger turn in his gut like a yin-yang eel, slippery and fishlike but dimly human in its blunt, circular probing, turning and turning, no rest. This alone, the exhaustion, and the mud, the heat—he shares with the Koreans on the tracks.
Changma
rains have pounded Korea the past two weeks. The runny mud has solidified to warm, pliable clay, and rumor has it tanks are circling in behind them. Infiltrators in peasant white have repeatedly moved behind American troops by joining crowds of refugees. No way to know.

Leavitt’s shrill, pursed-lipped signals
(here’s a kiss for you babe)
pierce the dull slip-timed sound of movement across the wooden ties of the railroad tracks. Easier than struggling through mud, but the necessity of measuring each step proves too much for the old people, some of the women struggling with infants and bundles. They’ve fallen out onto the gravel between the two lines of track, straggling on at a slower pace. Leavitt lets them; he can’t afford men to police both sides of the column, can’t guard against infiltrators on both flanks if in fact they exist. He wants all his men where he can see them in case of snipers or attack; he fears the new replacements are so green they’ll fire on one another if they’re spooked. He calls to the Koreans rhythmically, consistently, on the beat, partly to calm his own men:
Ppalli.
Hurry.
Kapshida.
Let’s go. The refugees need no urging; it’s their civil war, their homes and lands lost, he’s merely a conductor. No savior here. The saving will come later, American command assures Leavitt, Tompkins, all the men who’ve survived the past month to lead boys barely out of basic. Leavitt’s hoarsely tonal shouts of
Ttokparo! Ijjokuro!
serve as adjacent percussion to other pictures he remembers intensely, starkly, across a terrible gulf of time and dimension. In another world, on an American morning lost to him, Lola whispers phrases on clean sheets in their room above the club.
My beautiful blond Jew, my Pennsylvania boy.
She loved to tuck her forearms under him as though he were her child and hold his sex to her mouth, drinking him in, her lips and tongue everywhere. Teasing him with her teeth, biting a little, then harder. He uses her words that were sex and song a year ago to keep his feet moving, keep him tensed and angry enough to stay alive and ride his boys like the ruthless fast-promoted cannon fodder he’s become.

This failing police action is UN in name only. The Americans, caught completely off guard when the North invaded in June, are scrambling, their asses hung out to dry. Ironically, the three months in Seoul with LIS before the invasion have made Leavitt one of the 24th’s more acclimated platoon leaders. Language Immersion Seoul was a pilot program MacDowell had hoped to expand. Regardless of any affiliation with Intelligence, MacDowell told them, more military capable of “social interaction” would be useful as tensions seesawed and North Korea continued its Red Chinese–inspired posturing. That was probably bunk. As far as Leavitt could tell, there had never been American Intelligence in Korea. Intelligence stayed dry, ate better, dressed in street clothes, and failed.

Clearly, some of those involved in LIS were being considered, quietly interviewed. That first day in Seoul, they’d had a file on the desk: Leavitt’s high school transcript, the citywide Latin prize he’d won, the community college scholarship he’d turned down to spite his old man, records from Fort Knox. They’d made inquiries.

“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. Something 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.