Martin Limon - Mr. Kill

At first we all just stared at one another and at the still-smoking rifle in Parkwood’s lap. As the ocean rose and fell, it seemed to calm us, and the hopelessness of the situation started to sink in. We were being taken out to sea by a madman, by the Blue Train rapist, by a man who’d already proven his disregard for human life. As long as he held that rifle, we were defenseless against him. And as we floated on this cold, dreary sea, there was no help in sight.

About a mile out, still in sight of the coastline, Parkwood ordered the haenyo off the boat.

Colonel Laurel protested. “We’re too far out,” he said. “They’ll never make it.”

“Bull,” Parkwood replied. “These women can swim for miles.”

The haenyo apparently agreed with him. They glanced back at Colonel Laurel, as if in apology. He nodded back, granting them permission. After all, on Cheju Island women are the breadwinners-or seafood winners, if you will-and these women had families to support. As sleekly as a pair of seals, the two women rolled off the edge of the boat and started paddling their way toward shore. Once they were about a hundred yards away, they stopped and stared back, as if saying good-bye. Then they turned toward shore and started seriously stroking toward home.

Parkwood ordered Ernie and me farther toward the front of the boat. Now the three of us were on one end, Parkwood on the other. He kept his finger in the trigger housing of the M-16, the barrel lying loosely on his lap. With the other hand he steered the boat away from Cheju Island.

“Where are we going, Parkwood?” I asked.

“Shut the fuck up.”

I shut up.

After a few minutes of glaring at the endless sea, he spoke again, this time directing his comment to Ernie.

“So, how’s Marnie?” he asked.

“Marnie?” Ernie was as surprised as I was.

“You know who I’m talking about,” Parkwood replied. “Is she still screwing Freddy Ray?”

The original complaints by the Country Western All Stars regarding various missing items-a microphone, a pair of panties, and finally a single cowboy boot-we had assumed were the results of carelessness or the booty of the occasional souvenir-hunting thief. They had seen a pattern in it; Ernie and I hadn’t. Now I realized that those were precisely the items that I’d seen earlier in the living quarters at the commo site atop Mount Halla, all jumbled in with a ton of other items, but there nevertheless. Most recently I’d also seen a red lace bra and panties. Originally, I’d written it off to G.I. bravado. There’s not a barracks in the US Army where a set of female panties isn’t prominently displayed somewhere, as a trophy of conquest.

“How long have you been stalking the Country Western All Stars?” I asked.

Parkwood grinned at me. “Ever since I saw the USO flyer in our weekly distribution. I haven’t missed a performance. Except for maybe the one tonight.” He grinned more broadly.

“Where are they playing tonight?” I asked.

“I thought you two were supposed to be watching them. At least I know Ernie here was staying as close to Marnie as he possibly could.”

It’s a crawly type of feeling to know that someone has been watching you, especially when we were the ones who were supposed to be providing security. But Parkwood was a nondescript kind of G.I.-a little under six feet tall, not heavy, not skinny, Caucasian with brown eyes and brown hair; probably the most prevalent description possible in the United States Army. All he had to do was sit quietly and he’d blend into any crowd. We’d never see him. And we never had.

The only thing unusual about him was his nose, round-tipped and slightly longer than normal.

“Did you pay Vance,” I asked, “to cover for you while you traveled around the country?”

“Hell, no. I wouldn’t pay that wimp nothing. He did what I told him and he was glad to do it.”

“Glad?” Ernie asked.

“Yeah, glad. So I wouldn’t beat the shit out of him.”

Parkwood guffawed at this, finding himself enormously funny.

Behind me, molars ground in the remnants of Colonel Laurel’s jaw. He wanted to try something, but it would be suicide and he knew it. Still, our odds might not get better, no matter how the scenario played out. Was Parkwood just going to force Ernie and me off the boat, so we could die out here, without wet suits, in the middle of the cold Yellow Sea? Or would he shoot us first? I decided to ask.

“Why did you bring us along, Parkwood? Why not just waste us back on the beach?”

Ernie flinched. Parkwood noticed it and grinned.

“Good thinking,” he told me. “Why not just waste you? I thought of that. But there’s always somebody who puts two and two together, and the ROK Navy patrols these waters like crazy, so I figured I’d better take a little insurance with me.”

“We’re hostages,” Ernie said.

“You’re just now figuring that out?”

I wanted to ask him about the rapes, but I decided not to ask directly. Parkwood was a guy who liked clever conversation, at least when he was the one holding an M-16.

“Those fences,” I said, “at the Anyang Railroad Station must’ve been quite a climb.”

“Not when you’re in good shape.” He took his hand off the rudder and stared at his palm. “I did cut myself, though.”

The boat swerved against the choppy sea. Quickly, Parkwood grabbed the rudder again and steered the little boat toward the north, or at least what I thought was the north. By now, we were out of sight of Cheju Island. How could Parkwood be so confident that he was heading in the right direction? Probably just counting on blind luck. Most people don’t realize that the Republic of Korea, besides the main land mass of the Korean peninsula, is composed of about 5,000 islands, Cheju being merely the largest among many. The Koreans are an ancient seafaring people. If Parkwood kept steering us in the general direction of north, he’d hit something eventually.

The air was growing increasingly frigid, and the steady sea spray battering my face and body didn’t help much. Ernie, so angry he could hardly talk, was turning blue. After more than an hour, Parkwood spotted something ahead of us.

“There it is,” he said. “Chujagun Island. We pass through the channel there and then it’s only a couple of more hours to the mainland.”

Parkwood was heading directly to the mainland, rather than traveling the much longer northeasterly route to Pusan.

“You’ve traveled by boat before?” I asked.

“Beats the ferry.”

Which is one of the reasons why we never saw his name on the Pusan-to-Cheju manifests.

“How’d you know,” I asked, “that day in Anyang, that the Blue Train was going to stop to let another train pass?”

“I didn’t,” he said. “I knew about the assassination, but I had no idea when the funeral train would come by.”

“So how did you plan to escape once you arrived at the Seoul Station?”

He shrugged. “Just winged it.”

“You have a lot of confidence in your abilities,” Ernie said.

“I’ve been at this a long time,” he said.

“‘At this’?”

“Yeah. Since I was a kid.”

Parkwood told us about his first train ride. It was back in the early fifties: ’54 or ’55, he thought, although he was too young at the time to be sure. Back then, the Super Chief of the Santa Fe Railroad was still a major mode of transportation to and from the West Coast.

“We boarded the train at Union Station in Los Angeles,” Parkwood told us. “Me, my mom, and my younger sister. The three of us, all dressed up like people did in those days. Me wearing a little suit with short pants and a bow tie, my sister with a new dress and a straw hat with a red ribbon on it. My mom, of course, looked like a blonde version of Barbara Stanwyck with a tight black skirt and net stockings and a tight vest to show off her figure. She even wore a pillbox hat with a half-veil on it, all the rage in those days.”