Hwang Sok-Yong - The Shadow of Arms

“A maintenance job. Wow, your dick is enormous.”

“Shit, yours looks like a frog.”

Bursting into laughter, Leon slapped Yong Kyu on the butt. When they opened the door inside, hot steam came rolling out in a steady stream.

“Hey, I don’t like it.”

“Listen, you should get the sweat out of your system. It’s good for you.”

They went in and sat down in the hot steam bath. Along the wall were seats that looked like stairs. The middle of the space was packed with bamboo branches from out of which steam was pouring upwards. Leon was covering his mouth and nose with a towel. Yong Kyu spoke.

“Take a look. There’s a pile of pebbles down there heated by fire. They’re covered with herbs.”

“It smells awful.”

“It’s not that bad, is it?”

They came out again, pulverized from the heat and the sweating. As they finished washing off with cold water, two girls came in and waited with huge towels. They were scantily clad and wore real flowers in their hair. With one arm Leon leaned on the girl who was drying his body and said, “She’s killing me.”

“Slow down, she’s just a kid.”

“Hey, you shit. It’s been over two months for me. The mere sight of that fucking uniform makes me want to puke.”

The girl smiled, slightly nudging Leon away. Yong Kyu went over to the bed first and lay down, and Leon then came over and lay down on the next bed. The girls were about to pull the curtains when Yong Kyu stopped them.

“I’d like to talk about business.”

Leon opened his eyes wide and tried to read the expression on Yong Kyu’s face.

“I want us to be friends. Friends must never cheat one another. I want to buy things from you.”

“Coffee, you mean? Well, I’ll give you the damn stuff free.”

“Not just a couple of boxes, I mean I want to buy as much as you can handle.”

Leon was silent. Instead of replying, he tapped the head of his bed with his finger, thinking. Yong Kyu went on.

“When you get back home, how much do you think you can make? What can you earn in a week?”

“Well, maybe between a hundred and two hundred. I spend it all on the weekend.”

“You can make ten times that. Look around, there’s a mountain of goods piled up in the warehouse. There’s everything there.”

Leon let out a short laugh. “I know the whole story. And there are many divisions in our warehouse where goods are being sold.”

“So much the better. Our supply vehicle goes to Turen every day. Once a day, or once every other day, whichever you like is fine with me.”

“Once every other day sounds good. We rotate, you know.”

“Let me have two pallets of salad oil on Monday.”

“Big or small?”

“Big would be better.”

Leon held out his hand for Yong Kyu to shake.

“If it’s only B-rations, I can let you have as much as you want.”

They shook hands. The girls were pressing, rubbing, and patting their shoulders and spines, moving down toward the calves.

“I think I can trust you. You’re not greedy,” Leon said.

“Your sergeant, did you say Stapley was his name? What’s his job?”

“He’s in charge of checking all the warehouses in our section. But he’s got no power over us and rarely interferes. A nice guy.”

“Career soldier?”

“No, he was drafted, too. He hates this war.”

“You, too?”

“I don’t know. I just want to go home soon.”

“All right, we’ll talk more later. Enjoy yourself.”

Yong Kyu signaled with his eye and the girls pulled the curtains together.

From the other side of the partition came the sound of Leon and the other girl laughing, then the sound of bare flesh slapping. Caressing Yong Kyu with her fingertips, the girl with him asked, “What do you want me to do?”

“What do you recommend?”

“Hands, body, special. . prices are different.”

“How different?”

“Five-dollar difference.”

“I’ll give you thirty. Do them all to that guy.”

“He already has a girl.”

“Do a double for him.”

With a look of disdain, the girl stared down at Yong Kyu with narrowed eyes and the corners of her mouth twitching upward, then she moved over into the next compartment. The whispering and giggling of the two girls could be heard together with eruptions of convulsive laughter from Leon.

“Hey, Sarge, you’re crazy! This is too much!”

Without responding, Yong Kyu put his clothes back on. He smoked a cigarette absentmindedly and listened to the gradual changes in the sound of their heavy breathing, the moving flesh and the laughs. He was detached. Thirty dollars for a girl, sixty for two, plus ten dollars for the bath — for a grand total of seventy dollars he’d bought hell’s pleasures. The girls would suck the marrow out of the bastard and leave him a drained pulp. . just as the goods heaped up in Leon’s warehouse had made the larger and more grandiose hell prosper.

Yong Kyu thought of the porn films he used to watch with the administrative agents back at the Grand Hotel. The constant hunger, the lack, the incessant material quest. The next day Yong Kyu had found his way into this bathhouse during duty hours. And he had come back once more with the team leader. He pictured sperm crawling on the screens like worms. His body was mindlessly hung between his legs.

He saw the countless limbs and blobs of flesh swept up into vinyl bags for disposal, the stench of the blood, the rotting wounds, the flesh swollen with an amber brown tinge, the sticky pus oozing around, the swarming maggots, the hordes of lizards ceaselessly slipping in and out of the hellish holes in torn and severed parts of corpses, . our machines, our poisons, our weapons, our own despair, hell is a frenzied festival of all the things we’ve produced, ourselves included.

Drink, drink, you’ll feel great at heart, peel and eat while it’s still soft and tender, chew it, relish it, suck it, suck it, stick it in deep and suck it, see you in a clean bedroom with graceful designs and tasteful decor, soft touch, for diminishing stamina, for indigestion, it’ll make you younger, it’ll make you sleep, stocks and savings and investments will make a deluge of money, of rifles machine guns rockets grenades cannon napalm helicopters tanks kill me take the GI money and run for the room down the hall, hey, whore here’s your customer, take him to your room sit down lie down undress go ahead spread insert suck pay soldiers of the Cross rise up for the Lord go away brimstone is burning God bless Americans God bless America.

When the smokescreen of this horrible blood-drenched war is gone, we shall see our finance still standing firm. And we shall also find money to drop on the next place, and money to rebuild the razed and ruined world. And we also shall find dollars that will illuminate the earth with a victorious peace by burning the lights in the factories once again.

Standing amidst the lower-class pleasure spots and GI bars, the Saigon branches of the Bank of America and the Chase Manhattan Bank resemble a modern granite forest sunk deep into the psammitic soil. These edifices were built especially to withstand the condition you know by the name of “war.” That is, the windows of the banks are bulletproof, and the walls are of reinforced materials designed to hold up against bombings and mortar attacks. If there had been no American power in Vietnam, then no American banks ever would have been built there. The economy of any nation that depends on American money will in time become America-oriented.

Yong Kyu took out his wallet and removed a red ten-dollar military certificate. Then he folded up sixty dollars more and placed it on the table where the girls would easily find and take it.