Silver Stallion (17 page)

Chandol had good reason to worry. Last year, Kumsan barely managed to win; at one time, Chandol's boys had been driven as far down as the abandoned water mill when the Castle boys attacked them with mud bombs containing bitter peach medicine. If a mud bomb exploded anywhere near you and a puff of the yellow powdered pesticide got into your mouth, you could not eat anything for one whole day. And Chandol had a new handicap this year. The five boys of Kumsan had fought successfully against the seven Castle boys for the past three years, but now, there were only four of them. Mansik was out. They would need a good plan to win this year's war and keep the Castle boys out of the dump. When the Castle village boys were gone, Kijun and Bong and Kangho slid down into the pit and began to rummage through the garbage, but Chandol remained on the sand, looking over at the ferry with an uneasy expression.

Night after night Ollye entertained customers. She found herself so drunk by the time she was ready to go home that she could not walk. Yonghi had reassured her over and over again that she would soon get used to drinking but she was drunk again tonight although she had only two cups of beer. And when she was sober, she felt restless or depressed most of the time; her skin would crawl all over with self-consciousness when she was at home, sober, with Mansik and Nanhi.

Sarging Mike with his hooked nose grinned at Ollye and said “Korean cunt namba wang” and something else, imitating Korean pronunciation, and Sarging Fist Nose and Sister Serpent laughed. Yonghi kept her left breast hanging out of her white dress because Sarging Mike wanted to suck it after every cup of beer as a “relish.” Ollye tried to join in their laughter in time but she missed her cue again. Her belated laugh sounded, even to herself, empty and stupid. Sarging Fist Nose was Ollye's only steady customer. He came to see her every week and Yonghi wondered why he liked Ollye so much since she spoke so little
Migook.
Ollye herself could not understand why he had fallen for her. He kept coming to see her even after she had vomited beer and pieces of ham and
kimchi
pickles and rice on his face and chest at their very first encounter. Sundok believed that the soldier had been utterly fascinated by the totally unprofessional service Ollye offered him.

As she spent more and more time with him in bed Ollye thought of him less and less as one of a kind with the monstrous
bengkos
who had violated her long months ago. She was no longer afraid or suspicious of him. This changing attitude enabled her to follow Yonghi's advice to “enjoy” the work now and then. One night she had totally abandoned herself to him, and was so aroused that she kept clinging to him for almost two hours until both of them were as limp as wet rags, drenched in perspiration. Yonghi, who had been with her own customer in the next room, kept commenting through the wall, “You're driving both of us here nuts. Can't you do it a little more quietly and ladylike?” Sarging Fist Nose had entered her three times but he was not willing to let her go at midnight when she usually went home. The sergeant called Yonghi to Ollye's room and told her that he would not be satisfied with a short-time and wanted to have his woman all night. Yonghi, half naked herself, observed with an amused expression the naked couple under the sheet and the telltale signs of violent passion in the littered room. “Great, Sis, great,” Yonghi said. “You're doing really great like a pro tonight.” Then she told Ollye what the sergeant wanted and demanded that she give him a long-time. By now Ollye had no strength left to leave. The sheets turned soggy with their sweat that night and smelled musty the next morning.

She had awakened, sober and frightened, at sunrise. The soldier was gone already, leaving only the odor of cigarette smoke and spilled beer in the stuffy room. This was the first time in her life that she had ever spent whole night outside her home. She winced in anticipation of going back to Kumsan in the bright morning sun and facing her children. She vaguely persuaded herself that she had to go to Central Market and buy some vegetables for side dishes at supper. She ambled around town for over two hours after buying some turnips and pickled garlic, because she was afraid to go home. When she finally returned to the Chestnut House around noon, Mansik was sullenly waiting for her by the walnut stump. Nanhi had cried until her eyes had turned red.

“Do we have any more beer left?” Yonghi asked. “I believe there's a case of beer out in the hall, Sis.”

Ollye tried to remember but her head kept swimming. “I'm not sure,” she said. She tried a little harder to remember and she thought there was still one more case of beer left in the hall. “I think there is,” she said. “Yes. We have one more case of beer in the hall.”

“Would you bring in five more bottles?”

“I see. I will.”

As Ollye staggered up on her wobbly legs, Sarging Fist Nose asked her,
“Odika?
Where are you going?”

“Beer,” Ollye said. “Beer. Drink beer.”

Fist Nose asked Yonghi, “More beer? You wanna more beer?”

“Yeah,” Yonghi said with an apologetic smile. “Ah wanna moa beer. Pibe moa bottle beer. Okay?”

Nodding his head okay, the soldier gestured for Ollye to sit down and wait. “I can do,” the Yankee said. “I can do bring more beer.” He reeled out of the room.

“He really treats you like a queen, Sis,” Yonghi said. “I hope my Sarging Mike will learn how to treat a girl from your sarging.”

Mike could not understand what the two women were talking about in Korean but he was obviously pleased that his name had been mentioned. He gulped another cup of beer, pulled Yonghi's exposed breast like an elastic toy toward his pouting mouth and sucked it.

Her mind was turning hazy from the drink, but Ollye still vividly remembered Mansik's hostile expression. She had hurried into the kitchen to cook the late breakfast and feed Nanhi—and to avoid Mansik's accusing glare. She scooped a gourdful of rice out of the buried jar and turned back, and Mansik was there, standing by the door, staring at her, his face frozen as hard as a marble tombstone.

Mansik asked point-blank, “Are you a whore?”

Ollye had been speechless. She could not even move her fingers. In the next room Nanhi was screaming at the top of her lungs.

Ollye had expected that Mansik would find out about her night work sooner or later, but she had not been prepared to face him.

Sarging Fist Nose came in with the beer in his arms and placed the bottles one by one on the table. Grinning broadly he mumbled something and Yonghi and Sarging Mike laughed and Ollye, though a moment late, laughed, too. You get used to anything if you practice often enough, she thought. Anything. Even laughing in time. Now she was quite used to the Yankee names too. The
bengko
names were so strange that she could not even imitate the sounds at first, but now she could say Jimmy, Billy, Duncan and almost all the names of the Yankees she had been in bed with so far. She also learned how to call a passing soldier whom she had never seen before; all she had to do was to just say “Hello, Joe, G.I. Joe, buy me drink,” as everybody else at Texas Town did.

One thing that she still did not know how to handle was her relationship with her son Mansik. Sometimes, even while she was in bed with a soldier customer and drunk, the faces of Mansik and Nanhi, always with frigid staring expressions, haunted her.

At Texas Town, there was a twenty-four-year-old girl with the Korean name of Meri as well as the
Migook
name of Mary. She never told anybody much about herself and nobody knew where she was from or what her real name was but she must have had a complicated past, for she had a six-year-old illegitimate daughter. Olive watched Mary and her daughter, who had the Korean name of Suson, meaning “the Narcissus Girl,” as well as the American name of Susan, but Ollye could not find any hints in the mother-daughter relationship that might help in her own relation with Mansik. Susan was so used to the life of the Texas Towns that she played with any
bengko
who came to sleep with her mother. While Mary was working with her customer, Susan would wander around the shanty town, looking for somebody to play with. Everybody, both the U.N. ladies and the Yankees, treated her like a mascot or a human pet.

Ollye could not imagine Nanhi as another Susan, and she certainly did not want her children to grow up in a whoretown. Yet she thought that if she received long-time customers, she could make some real money quickly, leave this place for good, settle down somewhere far away and begin a new life.

“Work like a dog for just one year until you make enough money to open a small shop somewhere,” Yonghi would say. “Then you can go and settle down at a remote town in Chungchong or Kangwon Province, open a cotton shop or a noodle house and live as happily ever after as you want with your children. Nobody there will ever find out you were a whore unless you tell them.”

So Ollye had asked Yonghi, with pretended casualness, if Sister Serpent would still like to open a club at the snake hunter's hut. Of course Yonghi wanted to, but she knew she could not make the boatman take her across the river. “Suppose you can find another boat …,” Ollye said. Sister Serpent realized that Mansik's mother had been privately working on a scheme of her own.

Yonghi and Ollye had packed up some American cigarettes, C-ration cans and slabs of chocolates and gone to Kamwa village where Ollye had once lived. At the village, Ollye visited several of her old neighbors to ask if anyone might sell or lease a boat to them. A fisherman suggested that they go down river to Kangchon and find the old man who worked for the Buddhist temple during the winter. He would not need his boat until next spring.

Most villagers of Kamwa and Kangchon shunned the two women because of Yonghi's bold “Western” attire and unwomanly aggressive manners, but the old man agreed to lease his boat to Ollye because he had been a long-time friend of her father. The old man also liked the American cigarettes they had brought for him. Besides, the money they offered him for a lease of two months amounted to the sum the old man would earn by a half year of fishing.

“Why don't you open the window, Sis?” Yonghi said, emptying the full ashtray, a jam jar, onto the earthen floor of the hall outside the door. “The cigarette smoke is suffocating me.”

Ollye staggered up, trying to stretch her short skirt with one hand to hide her naked knees. She lifted the window and propped it open with a chopstick. When she sat down again next to Sarging Fist Nose, she felt somewhat cooler but her dizzy head would not clear. She knew she would not last long in this business. She was simply not cut out for this kind of life. And she had to start a new life before Nanhi was old enough to understand what her mother was doing. She did not want her daughter to suffer the way Mansik did now. Mansik was always glum these days and rarely answered her. He even skipped his meals because he was too frustrated and angry to have any appetite. The return of Sister Serpent to Kumsan had certainly been the last straw for Mansik.

The old man had been so pleased with the deal and their gifts that he volunteered to deliver the boat to Cucumber Island. When the boat arrived safely at the islet and the old man had gone to town to return to his home by train, Ollye and Yonghi had loaded their trunks and the sign on the boat and crossed the river. They were surprised to find how exhausting it was to row a boat; it took almost a half hour for them to reach the opposite bank, pushing and pulling the heavy creaking oars as the old man had showed them. They moored the boat by the tree near the snake hunter's shack and went to the Chestnut House where they were going to stay until the riverside hut was ready.

When Yonghi entered the Chestnut House, Mansik had been feeding his rabbits. “Hello, boy, long time no see,” she said cheerfully. “But we're going to see each other a lot from now on.” Taken aback at the sight of the Yankee whore walking side by side with his mother, the boy looked at Yonghi, at his mother, and then at Yonghi again. “You're not going to say hello to me?” asked Yonghi, reaching out to pat his head. The boy stepped back, dodged, and stopped short when his back touched the wire netting of the rabbit cage. He glared at the woman as if she were a criminal. “What is the meaning of this, Mansik!” Ollye tried to scold her son, but she was not sure if she was entitled to. “She's your mother's friend.” Mansik ran out of the house and did not return home until dark.

Yonghi and Ollye went back to Cucumber Island the next day to settle matters such as paying the remaining installments of rent, arranging to purchase drinks and Yankee food, and notifying the steady customers of the new location of the Club. Yonghi instructed Sundok to change the name of the old Dragon Lady Club to Club Goldfish “so that all the customers coming here will drink like fish to make us rich very quickly” and left her in charge. Then the two women went to town and hired a carpenter and two workers to remodel the snake hunter's shack. First of all, Yonghi wanted the kitchen converted to a room with cubicles for entertaining soldiers. They did not need the kitchen because they would have their meals at the Chestnut House and they could cook the snacks which went with drinks with canned solid alcohol fuel. They decided not to entertain any customers at the Chestnut House because Ollye needed a place to keep her children apart from her shame.