“But hey, Rambo, you got hot sex last night, too, huh?”
“Why do you say that?”
“Otherwise you’d be real mad at me.”
“I wouldn’t tell you if I did.”
“See, I’m right,” Jung said, leaning back on the couch. He had already forgotten about his betting debts. “I’m glad. I’m afraid you some homo.”
“Dream on.”
“Maybe, brother. You never know. Maybe I’m sick of women. Sick of all their bullshit. You not?”
“Not near as much as they’re probably sick of mine.”
“See what I mean? Listen to you! We getting trained, like this! Fucking bullshit. My wife make me jump up and down whenever she want. Go to work early, go back home early, don’t see my friends, feed baby, fix shower door, fix car. Don’t touch, no sex now. Or, wake up, wake up, sex right now. Now she kick me out and I get same kind bullshit, but from God damn waitress!”
“You should leave Sang-Mee alone.”
“Tell me about it! Whole night she was crying, her face a fucking mess, saying where I been? Why golf take so long? Why poker take all night? How come no more present, no more ring and necklace? How come I don’t love her anymore? I want to say, ‘When did I ever love you, fucking bitch?’ ”
“But you didn’t.”
“Hey, I was tired. Then she got very mad, when I fell asleep. Then she cry some more. She was here for a while but I guess she’s gone.” He immediately checked his wallet, expecting it to be emptied, but there was still a decent slab of bills inside. Being skilled at golf and cards, Jung made his pocket money off his friends; but, after the custom, he spent most of the winnings on their eating and drinking afterward, and whatever was left on his mistresses.
“I’m hungry. Hey, you want to eat? I pay.”
“I got work to do.”
“No problem. I give you morning off.”
“You know I’ll just have to work twice as long tomorrow. Besides, the head’s probably a mess. Mrs. Kim will just complain.” Mrs. Kim owned the Korean restaurant on the mezzanine, and because her customers had to use the mall bathrooms she was often harping on Hector, though more to get him to speak to Jung than anything else. She despised Jung because he never did anything he promised in the way of improvements, but she let him eat gratis anyway (even if he ordered extravagantly), for he convinced his uncle, the mall owner, who lived in Long Island, to keep extending her lease every six months, at a very reasonable rent. She had the cook make the food too salty or sweet whenever he came in with his buddies, so they would think twice about eating there when he next suggested it in the hope of saving himself the tab.
“Okay, you work, and when I wake up again we can eat.”
“Sang-Mee’s working today,” Hector told him.
“You think I give a damn? I’m not afraid of her.”
Last week Sang-Mee spilled a pitcher of water onto Jung’s back, saying it was an accident. Jung had jumped up and might have struck her but Hector had held him back. Sang-Mee mused aloud how fortunate it was that it wasn’t hot soup. This made Jung angrier and he berated her viciously in Korean but she just smiled and went into the kitchen. Jung deserved it; he had been seeing her off and on for the past couple of years, but had dumped her right after his wife booted him, presumably because he had no more excuses about having to stay in his marriage. Hector liked Sang-Mee, for she was always quick with a kind word and had a spark in her eyes that made her prettier than she was otherwise, but then he pitied her, too, for her sticking by Jung for so long.
“I’ll eat with you if we eat somewhere else.”
Jung cried, “What? Now you on her side?”
“I just think you ought to leave her alone.”
“Me? She better leave
me
alone! She
harass me
. Last week she spit in my tea! I get her fired real easy, you know.”
“No you won’t.”
“Okay, Rambo, okay!” he said, holding up his hands. “See, you on her side.”
“You want to eat or not?”
“Okay. But I want to eat here. I leave her alone. Been too long, and Mrs. Kim getting off easy. Plus, I need cash. My wife taking all my money, say it’s for kids but I know she lying.”
“She’s using it for booze and gambling and boys?”
“You hilarious guy, Joe. Maybe I’m not so hungry anymore.”
“Suit yourself. I still have the bathrooms to do.”
“Okay, okay, let’s go up.”
“I filled the pail already. I’ll meet you in an hour.”
“I’m starving, Joe!”
“Go by yourself, then,” Hector answered, turning to leave.
“You better work first,” Jung grumbled, tapping out another cigarette. He lit it and flitted his hand at Hector. “Go, go. I can wait, God damn.”
Hector wheeled the full rolling pail of hot water and ammonia to the elevator and keyed it to STOP while he swabbed the floor and then wiped down the walls and button panel with a dampened rag. Like everything else in the mall, the elevator car was in a sorry condition, the wooden floorboards buckled and the metal walls dented and scratched and scrawled over with permanent marker in several languages. As he rode it up to the second level, the car lurched and seemed to slip off its catches as if due to a worn clutch and he imagined the cable above him finally fraying and sending him hurtling to the bottom. And it would be fine, if his end should happen here; there was no better place, if certain dark gods should be served. But the fall might not be quite far enough (there was just one underground parking level) and he knew his fate would likely be that he’d emerge as usual from a heap of sure mayhem with nothing deeper than the usual transitory wound.
The bathrooms he saved for last, for if he started there he’d have to change again before vacuuming the carpets amid customers. It always smelled like a stable, but then worse for the carelessness of people. People could only wish that they lived like animals. Hector could clean them up well enough, but the general condition of the facilities was past maintaining, the stall doors long missing, the walls covered in graffiti, the sinks cracked, most of the panels of the drop ceiling water-stained and ajar. When some of the panels finally rotted through enough to fall down, he mentioned it to Jung, but nothing was ever fixed or replaced and Hector felt no need to mention it again.
As usual the bathrooms were a disaster, the toilets plugged, the basins and floors rankly fouled as they always were on weekend mornings, but especially so ever since the karaoke bar opened, several months ago. The women’s room required extra attention, as someone had vomited in the sink but mostly missed the mark. Hector swabbed it first with the mop before spraying it with ammonia and then took a sponge in his hands to wipe down the worn porcelain and rusting faucet and handles. He didn’t use gloves. His hands were perennially red from the cleansers but no longer felt the sting of the caustic solvents, being scalded into numbness; as such they were also oddly smooth to the touch, as Dora had once noted in the bar. The mirror above the sink had long been smashed and instead of glass Jung had screwed a thin panel of stainless steel to the wall. Hector took a plunger to the toilets and worked each steadily until all manner of detritus welled up and after flushing each several times he mopped the floor and then had to mop it again with a freshly filled pail from downstairs in the janitor’s closet.
On the way back up he saw Jung and Sang-Mee across the mezzanine, standing very close to each other outside the restaurant. She was softly pummeling Jung in the chest as he was trying to pull her against him. They were both slight of frame and not tall, and if he hadn’t known them he could have mistaken them for youths in thrall of a complicated and passionate first love. Then they were kissing, quite tenderly, and Hector was reminded that while rife disorder ruled this world, there was also human tendency and need (however misguided, however wrong) forever tilting against it. Love was the prime defiance, of course, most every story told of that, though well short of love there was the simple law of association, just nearness and contact, which Sang-Mee and Jung were reenacting, and which Hector was perhaps about to broach more deeply with Dora. He was rootless and unstrung as always but something in his gut felt at ease with the notion that she might be in his apartment when he returned.
He cleaned the men’s room in the same manner, and by the time he finished, his hands and arms and the front of his coveralls were splattered with muck and dirty water, dressing him in a feculence that was at once vile and familiar, this coat of waste and rot.
He was long past being repulsed by such things. After the trouble with Zelenko in his regular platoon, he was assigned to a Graves Registration Unit. Hector ended up serving in it for the largest part of his active duty; like many of the Graves Units it was a colored one, and as such the assignment itself was meant to be an equal part of his sentence, apart from the work of having to handle bodies in every state of mutilation and decay. It was unsettling at the beginning for him to work side by side with the black GIs, for he’d never known or even been in close proximity to any blacks except when he was in Albany once with his parents and they got momentarily lost at night in the streets of Sheridan Hollow, finally venturing into a church to get directions out. The Negro soldiers were estimable and relaxed among themselves, and though he kept his distance as he did with everyone else, none of them had a need to call him out or taunt him for his movie-idol looks. They avoided trouble because there were other troubles to be had equal to or worse than the misery of body handling, like unloading munitions, or fighting on the line. Better to do the ghoul’s work of cleanup and retrieval, which was dangerous enough with the booby traps and land mines.
But it was like anything else, for as disgusting as the tasks were, one grew accustomed to the abominable sights and smells and processes of the necessary operations: the way you’d have to tug just enough on a corpse’s arms, say, if the rest of him was stuck in the dirt and a bit too ripened, so as not to pull them off completely; or how you’d pour hot water from a kettle and chip away carefully with a bayonet to release a poor bastard who was frozen facedown in snow and ice, the flesh falling off sometimes like shredded meat, and other times remaining absolutely preserved and perfect if he’d been there only a night or two. Or in the first days of the spring thaw how they’d find a mess of bodies in a ditch and could tell only from the uniforms if they were enemies or friendlies, and if friendlies maybe only from the hair whether they were white or black, because all of them had turned the color and sheen of licorice by then, the skin finely lacquered by the elements. Every man is a black man in the end, was the joke among them, which made for a bitter laugh and a moment’s introspection before they’d continue traversing the slushy snowpack of the hillsides in search of newly exposed bodies. That is, when the front line had moved far enough forward; but even then there was the threat of sniper fire or an opportunistic mortar round, Davison and Jeffords getting it that way one day in early April, a single round landing on the exposed slope of the next hill and leaving a scatter of red on white. The Chinese mortar position was instantly wiped out of existence by both rear and forward artillery batteries, and then Hector and his partner and a pair of medics didn’t wait for the regular grunts to go up but hiked up to help them, though it quickly became apparent when they reached the spot that it was retrieval duty for them now, Hector immediately heading back down and then up again with body bags, their uniforms and boots getting more bloodied than usual from handling the freshly dead.
Hector could never quite inoculate himself against the sight of blood, and he readily volunteered to do the very worst tasks, gaining the respect and appreciation of the other men, though it was secretly to avoid that certain hue, that crimson brightness. They called him the Prim Reaper, though chummily, judging him to be a little crazy as he knelt over some headless, legless, armless torso, probing with chopsticks or needle-nosed pliers or with his fingers to see if the dog tags had somehow descended into the flesh. They couldn’t know that he’d rather deal with the horror of a rotting body visibly shifting and radiating a sickening warmth from its hold of maggots than with that clean red proxy of life. It was that blush still in the skin, in the eyes, that residual vitality of someone just dead or killed, that always shook him to his bones. Life was too fearsome. At least the long dead were dead, if fouled and base, their forms a mere figuration of the inevitable, just flesh collapsing, denaturing into nothing but unsung mud and dirt. It was mud and dirt he was lifting, bagging, collecting with his bare hands, and he could simply wash it off afterward, though having to clean carefully under his fingernails, scour them with a tuft of steel wool dipped in kerosene to rid the most resistant notes.
He unconsciously brought his fingers to his nose now, as was his habit ever since those days, and while they stunk for sure he couldn’t make out any of that unsavory, fecund redolence. And yet, something else had been revived. Was it the smell of smoke, of ash? He had long thought that was finally dissipated, gone for good, but then he was someone who was too often mistaken.
FIVE
Yongin
, South Korea
, 1953
HECTOR BEGAN WORKING at the orphanage soon after the armistice, in June. He had been given his separation from the army for “a pattern of discreditable conduct” that included charges of chronic fighting, trading in contraband, and assaulting an officer. The fighting he was certainly guilty of, but the other charges were debatable, the black-market dealing a case of his being an unwitting courier for a friend, and then the one of striking an officer outside a bar in Itaewon completely bogus; there was a wild scrum of drunken servicemen and Hector pushed a lieutenant who was kicking an already passed-out grunt and the officer tripped back over someone else, his face clanging against the rim of an empty fuel drum. The officer was badly gashed and nearly lost his ear, and it was only due to the resolve of his idealistic army lawyer that Hector received a bad-conduct discharge and not six months in the brig.