The Wandering Ghost (4 page)

Late in the morning, Ernie and I stopped at Camp Casey’s 13th Field Dispensary. As usual, four or five Quonset huts of various sizes were hooked together by short walkways. I wanted to take a look at Private Druwood’s body. Maybe it would tell me something that would give me a clue as to Jill Matthewson’s disappearance. More likely, it wouldn’t. But if the corpse was still here on Camp Casey, I wanted to see what I could. In any investigation, more information is always better than less.

We entered through the back, via a loading dock where Division ambulances pulled up and delivered soldiers who’d been injured in field training. Field training is the lifeblood of any infantry division. A way for young soldiers to stay in combat trim. As such, it was constantly being conducted somewhere in the Division area.

We pushed through double swinging doors. A young man, stripped to the waist, sat on a metal table staring at his bleeding arm. A jagged shard of purple bone stuck through the flesh. A tall man with swept-back brown hair ministered to him, blood spattering his white coat. He jabbed the young soldier’s biceps with a syringe and told him to lie back and try to relax, the MEDEVAC to transport him to Seoul would arrive in a few minutes. The young man seemed unsure but then, apparently, the drugs kicked in. His eyeballs rolled back in his head and he leaned to his side and the tall man in the white coat eased him down onto the metal table. When the young soldier was arranged neatly, the tall man turned to face us.

“What are you doing here?”

His name tag said WEHRY. His rank was specialist six. Not a doctor, a medic.

“Druwood,” I said, flashing my identification. “The body still here?”

The man’s eyes narrowed. “Yes. We’re going to send it down to Seoul on the same chopper transporting this young man.”

“We want to look at it,” Ernie said.

Wehry straightened his spine, thrusting back his shoulders. “Absolutely not. The body is encased and prepared for transport and no one is going to look at it until it reaches the medical examiner in Seoul.”

Ernie and I glanced at one another. We had developed a routine for this type of contingency. In a bureaucracy as cumbersome as the United States Army, we’re forced to perform it often.

Ernie approached Wehry, his face twisted into a sneer, his body relaxed, hands on hips, doing everything he could to convey to Spec 6 Wehry that Ernie was totally disgusted with his response.

“Do you
realize
what you’re doing, Wehry?” Ernie asked. “Obstructing justice? Do you have any idea who sent us here?”

“I don’t care,” Wehry replied. “We have procedures. No one can traipse in here and start examining bodies.”

Ernie stepped to his left, opening his jacket, letting Wehry see the hilt of his .45 in its shoulder holster, making him worry that Ernie was about to pull it. I moved to the right. The injured soldier moaned as I did so, and then Ernie raised his voice and started gesticulating wildly. Wehry crossed his arms and was having none of it, shaking his head resolutely. I stepped to the far side of the room and pushed through a single swinging door.

It wasn’t hard to spot the corpse. A body bag, full of something long and lumpy, lay on a metal cart. I stepped quickly toward the bag and examined the red tag on the bottom. DRUWOOD, MARVIN Z., PRIVATE (E-2). I reached to the top of the bag, grabbed the zipper, and pulled.

I don’t think anyone ever gets completely used to the odor of death. I know I haven’t. It slapped me like a clammy hand enveloping my face, suffused with the raw, gamy scent of meat.

Holding my breath, I examined the body as best I could. Feet, legs, genitals, hips, abdomen, chest: all body parts were intact but none of them looked normal. Everything, especially the arms, was scraped red and raw. The elbows and fingers had virtually no flesh left on them whatsoever. The nails, without exception, were torn, bent back. Had the body been dragged behind a jeep? That was the first thing that leaped into my mind. But then some part, like maybe the lower legs and feet, would’ve been spared the shredding. But nothing on Druwood’s body had been spared. It was as if he had been dragged, face down, along cement. The neck was bruised and slightly askew; it had probably snapped. The face looked surprised, mouth open. I closed the eyes. But the biggest attention-getter on the body of the late Private Marvin Z. Druwood was the front top quadrant of his skull. Smashed in. Red and pulpy with shards of bone sticking out. That impact is what had killed him, and probably snapped his neck at the same time. I leaned down to look more closely at the gaping wound and saw gravel. Flecks of it. I carefully removed one of the larger pieces and held it up to the overhead light. I rubbed it between my fingers. It was jagged. Applying only a very light pressure, the tiny chunk crumbled into powder.

Cement.

He’d fallen from a great height and cracked his skull on something made of cement. Pretty much what the provost marshal and Warrant Officer Bufford contended. Still, there were things here that didn’t add up. Had the body been scraped in the fall? Or after it?

The door squeaked behind me. I turned. Red-faced, Spec 6 Wehry stood in the open doorway.

“What in the
hell
do you think you’re doing?”

I didn’t bother to answer. Instead, I zipped up the bag, rubbed my hands on the side of my coat, and walked past him. In the back room of the dispensary, I passed Ernie and the injured soldier still laying on his gurney. I kept going, onto the loading dock. Then I hopped down onto the gravel-topped parking lot. At the far edge, I stood for a while, staring across a vast expanse of lawn at the helicopter landing zone on the far side of the Camp Casey parade ground. Hands on my hips, I took deep breaths. The cold Korean winter filled my lungs.

I felt it now. The old remorse. The old anticipation of something horrible that was about to happen that I couldn’t do anything about.

My mother was still young. Still healthy, still beautiful, and yet she was dying. I was her only child. The women stood around her, their heads covered with black shawls, candles flickering in brass holders. They mumbled prayers in Spanish, kissed the tips of their fingers, and then caressed the silver crucifixes hanging at their necks.

I wanted it to stop. I wanted things to return to normal. I wanted my mother to laugh and shout and pinch me and chase me around the backyard of the little hovel in East L.A. in which we lived. But she was so pale and her breathing was labored and she didn’t move. And then later—I’m not sure how much later—the priest told me that she was gone. My father had already fled, run off to Mexico like the coward that he was. I moved in with foster parents, first one set and then another, the entire program compliments of the Board of Supervisors of the County of Los Angeles. Living like a fugitive, I started to become alert to people’s moods, the flickering of their eyes, the inflections in their voices, the double meanings in the words they spoke. I dealt with the jealousy of the other kids in the families, the hatred of the fathers when they watched me shovel beans into my mouth, the impatience of the mothers when I dirtied one pair of blue jeans too many.

But through it all, I remembered what my mother had told me before she died: Be strong. Don’t lie to people. Don’t be like your father.

I promised her I wouldn’t.

At the pedestrian exit from Camp Casey, Ernie and I flashed our identification at a frowning MP. Then we walked past a line of waiting kimchee cabs, across the MSR, and entered the bar district of the fabled city known as Tongduchon.

HUANYONG
!
a sign said, in the indigenous Korean
hangul
script. Welcome!

It was followed by three Chinese characters:
tong
for east,
du
for bean, and
chon
for river. Tongduchon. East Bean River. Welcome to Tongduchon. Or TDC as the GIs loved to call it.

For a young American GI, the bar district in Tongduchon is the French Riviera, Las Vegas, and Disneyland all rolled into one. It’s brightly lit and there’s bar after bar and nightclub after nightclub and hundreds of young women parading around in various stages of undress. A bottle of Oriental Brewery Beer costs 200
won
, about forty cents, and a shot of black-market bourbon costs 250
won
. An “overnight,” an evening with a beauteous lady, costs anywhere from ten to twenty-five dollars, depending on a few variables: her pulchritude, your willingness to spend, and how close it is to the end-of-month military payday.

Night had fallen. Therefore, Ernie and I had changed out of our coats and ties and were now wearing our “running-the-ville” outfits: nylon jackets with fire-breathing dragons embroidered on the back, blue jeans, sneakers, and broad, mindless grins on our smoothly shaven faces. We may have looked like a couple of idiots wasting our money in a GI village that’s designed to do nothing else but separate a GI from his pay, but actually we were conserving the twelve bucks a day in travel per diem 8th Army authorized. We were tailing an armed military police patrol.

The patrol was composed of three men: a U.S. Army military policeman; a
honbyong
, an ROK Army military policeman; and a KNP, an officer of the Korean National Police. The reason for its odd composition was that the mayor of Tongduchon and the commander of the 2nd Infantry Division wanted to ensure that all jurisdictions were covered. Whether any given miscreant was an American GI, a Korean soldier, or a Korean civilian, one of the triumvirate of law enforcement officers would have the authority to arrest him. Or her.

The patrol wound through a vast labyrinth of narrow alleys filled with flashing neon and jostling crowds and rock music blaring from vibrating speakers. They entered bar after bar, checking out the American GIs and shoving through small seas of scantily clad Korean business girls. Usually, they were greeted and bowed to by an elderly female hostess. More often than not, she wore a brightly colored
chima-chogori
, the traditional Korean skirt and blouse. These women were the
mama-sans
, the older sisters to the business girls, the moms to the American GIs, the managers of all operations in the nightclubs for the absentee bar owners. These women wore their black hair formally, knotted high atop their heads and held together with jade pins, and often they wore earplugs, so they wouldn’t go deaf listening to the obnoxious American rock music pulsating out of enormous stereo speakers.

The ville patrol paraded into each nightclub like a pack of young kings. They searched not only the environs of the nightclub but also the areas behind the bar and the back storerooms and particularly the bathrooms, both women’s and men’s. If everything seemed to be in order—there were no fights, no drugs being dealt, nobody passed out—they departed and marched to the next bar. Ville patrol was the job Jill Matthewson had done. For years— probably since the Korean War ended in 1953—the ville patrol had consisted of three policemen. Adding Jill was an innovation. She became the fourth member of the team. Since American women had first been assigned up here to Division, a few of them complained about Korean cops barging into ladies’ rooms and checking the stalls, with them in it! So the Division provost marshal assigned Jill Matthewson to the ville patrol with the understanding that it was her duty to check the female latrines.

Now that she was gone, and with no female replacement in sight, the ville patrol was back to the same old intrusive routine.

So far, Ernie and I had been discreet. The ville patrol hadn’t noticed that we were following. Unprofessional of them but who can blame them? They were bored. They did this every night, and it figured that in the history of the 2nd Infantry Division the ville patrol had probably never been followed before. Not once. We wanted to see how they operated before questioning them. When it became clear that nothing untoward was going on and they were conducting themselves in a professional manner, Ernie and I stopped them outside the Montana Club.

The American MP’s name was Staff Sergeant Weatherwax, Rufus Q., a thin black man with an aquiline nose and eyelids that seemed to be having trouble staying open, like a jazz musician maintaining his cool. We flashed him our CID badges and asked about Jill Matthewson. He knew her but had worked with her only a few nights due to the fact that the ville patrol was a rotating duty.

“But Matthewson didn’t rotate,” I said. “She was on full time.”

“Right. Because she was the only female MP.”

“We heard she was friendly with some of the Korean women,” Ernie said. “Can you give us a hint on that?”

“Can’t be sure.”

“There must be something.”

Then Weatherwax started conversing with the Korean cop and the ROK Army MP. I helped the conversation along by speaking Korean.

They remembered. Down the road, through a narrow passageway known as “the crack,” an area of Tongduchon frequented mostly by black American soldiers, in a joint called the Black Cat Club, Jill had smiled and hugged the female bartender. And once or twice they’d seen her there, in civilian clothes, when she was off duty.

I asked Weatherwax another one: “Did Corporal Matthewson have a boyfriend?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Why not?” Ernie asked.

Weatherwax thought about it for a while. “I’m not sure exactly but it seemed she didn’t like GIs much.”

“But a lot of them were hitting on her.”

“
All
of them were hitting on her.”

“Including you?”

He grinned. “Hey, I gave it a try once.” As he studied our faces, his grin turned to a frown. “When she didn’t go for it, I left it alone.”

“That makes you a minority of one.”

Weatherwax didn’t respond.

Ernie inhaled sharply and took a step toward Weatherwax. “I remember you now,” Ernie said. “As soon as you smiled. You were in the hallway this morning. At the Provost Marshal’s Office.”

Weatherwax stared at Ernie blankly.

Ernie waved his forefinger at the hooked tip of Weatherwax’s nose.

“Having a good time with your pals, eh Sarge? Hooting and howling about Eighth Army REMFs.”

Weatherwax groaned and rotated his head as if his neck hurt. “If you can’t handle the heat up here in Division,” he said, “then run on back to the rear echelon.”