No Dominion The Walker Papers - By CE Murphy Page 0,57
knowing that I’m only home for the
summer…my mother is worried, but trying not to show it. I only hope he’ll
be well enough for me to go back to Oakland in the autumn.
Well, no, it’s not the only thing I hope. I hope you’ll come home to me soon,
too, so we can be a family. I love you.
Letters like that could keep a guy going a long time, and I got a stack of ‘em every time there was a mail call. Resta the guys gave me grief, but it was envy, not meanness, that drove ‘em. I took it without complaint, knowing too many of ‘em didn’t have anybody writing them at all.
Korea wasn’t what I expected, truth be told. I couldn’t have said what I had expected, but I guessed I had this kinda blank slate in my head for it to fill in. Except it was really blank, sorta nothing more than sand and sky, so coming halfway around the world to find out the same kinds of wildflowers grew in Korea as in my back yard in Washington kinda threw me. They spent a lotta time in Basic telling us about the enemy not being like us, but the folks I saw looked tired and afraid, and that was how me and my buddies felt a lot of the time. ‘course, my commander woulda said I was looking at the South Koreans, our allies, but the only reason I could tell Northerners from Southerners was which end of the gun they were on.
One of the guys had it worse, though. He was an America-born Korean called Danny. Danny Kim, our ghost-man. He went in and out behind the lines like nobody’s business, disappearing for days and weeks and coming back with intel. Mosta the time when he showed back up he tried to slip into camp quiet-like, so he could shower and get into uniform before anybody laid eyes on him. We knew what he did anyway, ‘cause he wore his hair longer than reg so he could blend better with the locals. Still, it was one thing knowing and another thing seeing him come in, dusty and broody, wearin’ local-style loose pants and t-shaped shirts or torn-off jeans and bare feet. I caught him coming in one night when I was on perimeter duty. I was staring out at the dark, listening to the sound of a crying baby needing help, when he came outta the trees and said, “It’s not real.”
For an ugly minute him and me were on opposite sides of the war, and I was the only one with a gun. The baby’s crying got louder, and something wrong came through it, a kinda nails-on-chalkboard sound for real, not figuratively. “It’s not real,” Danny said again. “Don’t go out there, Muldoon. You won’t come back.”
“Shit, man, I don’t know if you’re real.” I waved him by, and stood my ground. After a little while the screaming faded, and I went out at dawn to have a look around. There wasn’t a baby, and there wasn’t any kinda sign there’d ever been one. I went back to camp feeling uncomfortable. At breakfast Danny showed up in the mess hall looking crisp as any soldier, and sat down next to me. “Thanks for not shooting me.”
“Thanks for not letting me go out there. What was that screaming?”
“A demon,” he said so easy I almost believed him. “It’s been suckering guys in some of the other platoons, and they’re going home in body bags, so don’t listen to it. Not ever.”
“Right.” I stared at him a minute, then shuddered. “What’s it like out there, all alone?”
Danny said, “Hell,” reflexively, an’ we both laughed. He said, “Confusing,” under the laughter, though, and I wasn’t surprised to hear it. It couldn’t be easy spin’ on your parents’ people, but it wasn’t something to talk about in a mess hall with a buncha officers nearby, either. So he said, “Where are you from, Muldoon?” instead, and we got to talking about the west coast and places we’d like to visit. “Assuming we make it out of here,” he said, and I shrugged it off.
“You gotta assume that, Danny. All of us are gonna make it out except,” and I raised my voice, “except you, Dandy, right? You’re gonna end up married to three Korean wives and never go back to Milwaukee.”
There was two Andies in the unit, my old pal Alabama Andy, and the newcomer Dandy Andy, who was