Lark and Termite
Authors: Jayne Anne Phillips
Tags: #General, #Fiction, #History, #Historical, #Fiction - General, #War & Military, #Military, #Family Life, #Domestic fiction, #West Virginia, #1950-1953, #Nineteen fifties, #Korean War, #Korean War; 1950-1953
ALSO BY JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS
MotherKind
Shelter
Fast Lanes
Machine Dreams
Black Tickets
LIMITED EDITIONS
The Secret Country
How Mickey Made It
Counting
Sweethearts
for Elie (1974–2005),
for Audrey (Boulder, 1975),
and for Cho,
infant boy born and died
in the tunnel at No Gun Ri,
July 1950
GI’s corrupted the native term han’guk saram, which means Korean, into the derisive slang “gook,” which was indelicately applied to all Asians, even in later undeclared wars.
—ROBERT J. DVORCHAK,
Battle for Korea
Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
—WILLIAM FAULKNER,
The Sound and the Fury
Is your mouth a little weak
When you open it to speak, are you smart?
—LORENZ HART AND RICHARD RODGERS,
“My Funny Valentine,” from Babes in Arms, 1936
Contents
North Chungchong Province, South Korea
North Chungchong Province, South Korea
North Chungchong Province, South Korea
North Chungchong Province, South Korea
July 26
North Chungchong Province, South Korea
JULY 26, 1950
Corporal Robert Leavitt
24th Infantry Division
He’d shipped out to Occupied Japan in December ’49; whatever baby was a tucked seed inside Lola’s sex, a nub the size of a tail-bone.
You want to marry me? You going to tell your mother who you’re marrying?
His mother wouldn’t care, he told her, his mother was dead, he wanted a woman who’d been around, he wanted her, he’d got her and he wasn’t leaving her, he never would, not really, was she hearing him?
I hear you, I’m hearing you.
Mother may I, mother me.
Left you too soon, didn’t she. Left you to me.
But he’s gone from Lola now, gone for months; the baby is inside her, cushioned and pure, isolate. Winter at the base in Tokyo was like clocking a job in uniform, all of Occupied Japan an American colony with its own clubs and bars. Tokyo felt fake, soft, a movie set. When Colonel MacDowell invited select soldiers to learn Korean in a pet project he called Language Immersion Seoul, Leavitt said yes to minimal advancement and a change of duty. He was in Korea by April, one of sixty LIS army enlisted men installed at KMAG. Korean Military Advisory Group was a remnant: a few hundred army brass and their support staff of minions and enlisted men. They’d nothing to do but stay put, a supposed symbol of preparedness overseeing largely symbolic Republic of Korea troops. Leavitt imagined his baby moving in a fluid, muscular nest he couldn’t touch or feel while the American military flexed its own small fist in divided territory, but KMAG’s isolated outpost disappeared the June morning North Korea invaded. Four weeks of near-constant combat since are a continuous day and night bled into Leavitt’s brain. Battle and the mayhem of retreat have changed the taste of his saliva and the smell of his sweat, but late July is Lola’s time. Any hour, any moment. If the baby was already born, an armed forces telegram might follow Leavitt for weeks across the rutted fields and dirt roads of this bloody rout. He tells himself he won’t need any telegram. Lola’s voice drifts close unbidden and it’s like she’s standing in the war next to him. No matter how loud the ordnance or artillery, how loud his own heart hammers, he hears her. Words she said when he could touch her.
You found your mother because she wanted you to. All those years, her asthma pulled the air from that little store while your father stood in the doorway. She wanted you out of there.
He keeps moving. Near noon of this infernally hot day, Lola’s voice moves him forward. Two or three emptied villages in the immediate area constitute Leavitt’s detail: “evacuation” of refugees whose unrecorded exodus proceeds apace with the American retreat. These double train tracks running west to Hwanggan are a godsend, boundary and direction for what is otherwise panicked flight and chaos. Replacements under Leavitt’s command are soft recruits from Occupation forces in Japan, rushed in by boat and train to reinforce besieged American troops. Most have never seen combat or heard artillery fire. They’re raw troops moved out at first light into countryside mired in another century. Rifle fire punctuates the darkness before and behind them; they’ve heard the terms “circular front” and “infiltrator’s war;" they’re sleepless and jumpy and they’re right to be scared. Many of them will die before Leavitt can teach them a thing. He has nothing to teach the Koreans in his charge, but the urgent crowd of two or three hundred thins and lengthens to a moving column once Leavitt signals the platoon to direct them off the road, onto the tracks. Easier here, a semblance of control, but there’s no evacuation possible, certainly none directed by Americans. No numbered Hangul signatures in someone’s logbook. No logbook. Everything in South Korea is clogged or broken. Equipment shipped quickly from American bases in Japan is constantly displaced; troop movement maddeningly slowed by refugees streaming away from the fighting. The South Korean inhabitants of numberless rural villages flee behind whatever resistance American troops can offer, their mud-wattle houses left empty, outdoor cooking fires still warm. There are conflicting accounts: Chinese Yaks or American F-8os strafed the area last night in advance of troop movement. Thatch roofs, saturated by weeks of rain, burn wet and smoky once they’re set afire. Smoke veils the air like souls in drifting suspension, declining the war’s insistence everyone move on.
The heat is dense, thick, and the rice fields at dawn are bright green emanations, alive with the sick fragrance they call night soil. Piled waste from countless country latrines, shoveled into pails and buckets and leaky ox carts, fertilizes the earth to yield and yield until the fields themselves are night. The spongy ground sinks underfoot, ripened and dark as any fermented secret. The ground breathes. Decay held still too long, Leavitt thinks. He keeps moving. Lola talks to him.
Nothing is wasted, nothing is waste. You think you didn’t need to know exactly what you know? How many boys your age blow a horn like you can and then enlist in peacetime? You wanted out of Philly mighty bad.
Philly is gone. Villages here are encampments sunk in a time before radios or jeeps, before horns or jazz or English words. Skinny, wary dogs wolf any shred of slaughtered chicken, duck, fish gut dropped to the ground while women tend outdoor fires and infants slung in cloth
podaegi
ride the backs of girls. Older babies stagger across the patches of ground reserved each habitation and squat when they like, teaching themselves, their trousers cut out so the cheeks of their asses plump like cleft fruit. Now those babies are gathered up, quiet in the heat. Lola says lines from the beginning, like they can start all over.
You know me now, don’t you. Say you do. Whisper.
She’s his own phantom, a smoke drifting close to him. The war makes ghosts of them all. Fifty years, a hundred years, they’ll still be here: vestige mist moving along a double rail bed near a wobble of a stream, the South Koreans in their white clothes, the GIs in mud-crusted khaki.
Since Osan, Leavitt doesn’t think beyond the war. Osan was July 5; Leavitt knows it was a Wednesday—he wrote the date and day on a letter to Lola the morning of the attack. Forty-eight hours later, one of three survivors in his group, Leavitt moved to another platoon. He moved to another, then another, moving up incrementally in rank as his superiors were killed and not replaced. He commands a platoon now and he sees that war never ends; it’s all one war despite players or location, war that sleeps dormant for years or months, then erupts and lifts its flaming head to find regimes changed, topography altered, weaponry recast. The Red Chinese and the NKPA are only the latest aggressors to pour across Korea like a death tide. Leavitt imagines thousands of war dead, disbelieving their own deaths, continuing to die and die on the same swaths of contested land. The American troops press on through heavy air, discounting their apprehensions as vague scent, cloud scrim, their own shot nerves, but Leavitt senses the dead furling like smoke from the vented earth, wandering the same ground as the living. Any American who stood at Osan and Chochiwon, at Kum River, should be dead. The majority are dead. Korea is choked with phantoms who will never get home. The Koreans themselves are phantoms, moving with their bundles and baskets, their children, their old people.
Even the villagers’ footfalls sound ghostly. Diverted onto the railroad tracks, they keep a dull time, their sandals slap-thudding the muddy ties. At least they’re off the road, or what passes for a road. The Americans traverse dirt trails they’ve broadened, rutted, bled into with trucks and bodies. All roads lead here, to these double tracks, to Lola and away from her.
Married, they’d stayed in her room for days before he left, taking longer and longer as time ran out. He shoved the bed against the wall and put the mattress flat on the floor. There they woke and slept on a stable continent whose silence never betrayed them, turning each other in circles like a clock whose two hands remained in circular, continuous alarm. Crying, Lola was nearly impassive, her face wet and still as though she couldn’t or wouldn’t give in to sobs. He’d never known a woman who cried like her, like she’d forgotten she was ever a child. Holding him with her silky hands, her face an inch from his, she breathed into his mouth through parted lips, and her eyes showed faint lines at the corners when she smiled. In five years, she told him, she’d begin to look her age. Good, he’d said, I’ll be ready. They’ve been apart now longer than they were together and he feels he’s more than made up the eight years between them. He can protect her now, even from herself, from him.
You found her, didn’t you, on the floor. She kept vanishing for years and then she was finally gone. You’re here, let her go.
Breathing, he keeps moving. He’d thought death leached air away in gasps, in the fishlike toneless labor of his mother’s asthmatic wheezing. Death was small then, like the click of a light turned off, or a sigh of air escaping from a radiator. Not here. Death surges in the ground like a bass line, vast, implacable.
The past he remembers, Lola, his stateside time in the service, Japan, even Seoul before the invasion, seems to have occurred in an adjacent dimension not quite connected to him, and the mirage he lived as a kid in Philly is cut adrift. The tenements and storefronts, the glittery concrete and asphalt, the chain-link fences bordering throbbing neighborhoods miles from the Liberty Bell, are some dream he no longer believes. Barber’s poles ran their spi-raled colors in the morning smash and bang, and every deli and bodega pledged its loyalties to a numbers runner smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee at a back table. Dented trash cans stood sentinel by the curbs, agleam in the pinky bronze light of late-summer afternoons. Neon signs flashed hot-pink
PIZZA
and lime green
BILLIARDS
all night as smoke borne on jukebox phrases eased from the doors of bars. On Shabbat mornings he played stickball, marbles, basketball with the Italian kids, the envy of his Jewish friends because his parents weren’t religious.
Noon on he worked in the grocery for his old man; they lived in the cramped apartment over the store. Every school day, three hours after classes, Leavitt worked for the old man. His mother cleared a shelf under the counter for his books, found a swivel stool with a back, told him to stay in it and do his homework if the old man wasn’t there. As he often wasn’t. Mostly, he lived elsewhere, and ranted and drank when he was around. She was the one who kept it going. Kept the radio going too, tuned low to Benny Goodman, Nelson Riddle. She was all for that dreamtime music, played in ballrooms and swank clubs she’d never see. Leavitt learned clarinet in the school band, then played a beat-up cornet until she traded some junkie musician groceries and ice cream for his trumpet. You practice, Bobby, she’d say. Sounds nice, she’d tell him. After she died, collapsed on the floor beside the old man’s treasured refrigerator case, Leavitt refused to even enter the place. Sixteen years old, he used the separate apartment entrance and narrow stairs that bypassed the storefront until he moved out. The old man soon changed the locks, and Leavitt lived with friends or girls. Two years later, in ’45, he graduated high school with no family in attendance. Days, for three years, he drove a delivery truck for a liquor wholesaler. Nights he played with one band or another in bars and clubs, had a run of nearly a year with a white jazz band that played downtown and wore suits. But he liked playing the black clubs, where he learned more and made less, and the pros called him Whitey with tacit affection. He was good enough to patch gigs together, but there was finally no reason to stay in Philly
One cold November day in ’48 he enlisted on impulse and the army bused him south three days later; he took to basic so hard the brass kept him on at Fort Knox for seven months, assisting drill instructors. Fort Knox billed itself as the “Home of Armor,” but Leavitt found he had no interest in driving tanks. They were dark, heavy, close inside, the men clutched together in a mechanized hole, breathing one another’s air. The tank crews loved the big guns and considered themselves invulnerable, but Leavitt wanted out, into infantry, where he could see and hear and move on his own. He’d come in fit but he trained compulsively, embraced army hierarchy and chain-of-command etiquette, pushed himself to attain firsts in every drill. He saw it all as protection, survival, his own invulnerability: if he attained perfect form, he increased his options while his mind-set remained his own, and the essential privacy he cultivated was assured. Nights he lay in an upper bunk, silently practicing fingerings, his trumpet fit to his mouth, tonguing the familiar mouthpiece while men snored around him.
The first weekend basic ended, he made his way to Onslow’s Club in nearby Louisville. Onslow’s offered booze, music, girls who lived upstairs and quietly sold their favors. Not Lola. She had three rooms on the top floor and didn’t sell herself to anyone. Onslow played decent piano with a dependable no-frills drummer while Lola sang standards and blues. He was old enough to be Lola’s father and then some, arthritic, “retired,” with his cane and his bad knees, his once-powerful arms and barrel chest, and his hamlike hands coaxed an unbelievably fluid sound from the best-tuned Steinway grand in Louisville. The second night Leavitt took his horn and sat in. By the third set Onslow said they should make it a regular thing. He’d pay Leavitt in free drinks and food, girls if he wanted them. Leavitt didn’t; he wanted Lola. When she finished he slipped unbidden up the stairs behind her, honed in on her, completely certain. The sounds of the club under them throbbed in the walls as she ascended above him through the narrow stairwell, hips and thighs a gauzy oval in her pale sheath skirt. Moving in near darkness like a slow, detached shape, she turned on the stairs as she paused to look down at him. Leavitt sees that shape now in his fragmented sleep or behind his eyes, glowing, asexual, like a flicker of light opening into himself. He can’t shake the feeling that seeing her, wanting her, playing behind her in the club, making love to her days and nights in her rooms that became his rooms, were practice for staying alive. Then as now he moved in what he couldn’t quite have, get to, reach, until her body gave it up to him like flames he sparked inside a darkness. She was luminous ground he worked and sowed, sweated for and lost. They found each other in blinding, convulsive instants that seared him open.
You sure you want this? It’s not me. It’s you, finding me like I’m your last chance.
He moves alongside the Koreans, touches the service revolver strapped to his waist in its snug holster. He can’t control his thoughts. Walking, he fantasizes being with Lola one more time and shooting them both while he’s still inside her, ecstatic, desperate to stay with her, not to die here. He imagines white explosive orgasmic nothingness before he thinks about her body as it must look and feel now, swollen full, the baby nearly born.
I’m carrying high and round, tight as a drum full of water. I know it’s a boy—he turns like a fish and he sees and hears for you, every sound, every thought I haven’t written.
He thinks of the baby enclosed in her darkness and hurtles away from them, sucked into a space behind his own eyes where his brain keeps time and his blood beats in his ears.