Part 40 (2/2)
”Meaning what?”
”You got the bra.s.s ring,” Ernie said. ”You will have succeeded-or will, as soon as Ken gets Pick back-in getting Don Juan Pickering to the altar, succeeding where G.o.d only knows how many women have tried and failed. But it's not going to be easy. You better win the Pulitzer prize now, because when you march down the aisle to the strains of 'Here Comes the Bride,' you'll have taken yourself out of the compet.i.tion.”
”Two questions, and no bulls.h.i.+t, please. Do you think Pick's coming back?”
”Yeah, I do. No bulls.h.i.+t. I think I would know if he wasn't. I really love the sonofab.i.t.c.h; he really is like my brother. Next question?”
”You don't think Pick would like it if I kept working? Maybe get a job on a newspaper in San Francisco?”
”You never thought about this, huh? Your girlish mind was full of visions of the Sugar Plum Fairy? Moonlight? Violins playing 'I Love You, Truly' to the exclusion of everything else?”
”Don't be a b.i.t.c.h, Ernie,” Jeanette said, and added, thoughtfully, ”No, I guess I never did.”
”Looking into my crystal ball, I see you, seven months after you march down the aisle, in this condition,” Ernie said, and patted her swollen belly.
”I like the notion,” Jeanette said. ”I don't know how I'm going to like actually going through what you're going through.”
”I think you'll like it,” Ernie said. ”There's something really satisfying about being pregnant. Anyway, shortly after that, you'll have a baby. When that happens, I don't think you'll really mind being a wife and mother, instead of a das.h.i.+ng war correspondent. To answer the question: No, I don't think Pick would like it at all if you kept on working. Knowing him as I do-and I know him, I think, better than anybody-what he will expect of you, when he comes home from setting a speed record between San Francisco and Timbuktu or wherever, will be to find you at the door wearing something very s.e.xy, with the bed already turned down, champagne on ice, and the baby asleep in clean diapers.”
”I just can't stop working, for Christ's sake!”
”It'll be your choice,” Ernie said. ”Like I say, I know him. He's really a great guy. But he's not a saint. What he is is a man, and all of them are selfish. They want what they want, and all we can do is learn to live with it. If we can't do that, we lose the man.”
”Jesus Christ! And here I was feeling sorry for you.”
”Don't feel sorry for me. I like my life-I love my life-with Ken.”
”Yeah, that shows,” Jeanette said. ”Jesus Christ, Jeanette Priestly, wife, mother, and diaper changer!”
”Jeanette Pickering,” Ernie corrected her.
”That does have a nice ring to it, doesn't it?” Jeanette asked.
She closed the rucksack and pulled the straps tight.
”You noticed, I'm sure, that amongst my delicate feminine apparel were two sets of GI long johns?”
”I noticed.”
”They itch,” Jeanette said. ”But Korea is cold at night. It is better to itch and scratch than to freeze your a.s.s. Write that down.”
Ernie laughed.
”You don't have to go with me to Haneda,” Jeanette said.
”Yeah, I do,” Ernie said.
Jeanette reached down to the bed and picked up and put on an olive-drab unders.h.i.+rt and a pair of olive-drab men's shorts. Over this, she put on a set of fatigues, then slipped her feet first into Army-issue woolen cus.h.i.+on sole socks and then into combat boots.
She looked at Ernie.
”How do I look?” she asked.
”Oddly enough,” Ernie said, ”very feminine.”
”Bulls.h.i.+t, but thanks anyway.”
She picked up the rucksack and walked out of the bedroom.
[TWO].
NEAR JAEUN-RI, SOUTH KOREA 1145 14 OCTOBER 1950.
Major Malcolm S. Pickering, USMCR, who had at first known to the minute how many days and hours and minutes it had been since he had had to set his Corsair down- how long he had been on the run-now didn't have any idea at all.
He wasn't even sure if he had eaten his last rice ball yesterday or the day before yesterday.
All he was sure about was that deciding to move north-eastward was probably the worst f.u.c.king mistake he had made in his life. And might well be the last major mistake of his life.
There was nothing in this part of Korea but steep hills and more steep hills. No rice paddies. d.a.m.ned few roads, and from what he'd seen of the traffic on them, it was mostly long lines of retreating North Korean soldiers, most of them on foot.
North American F-51 fighters, carrying the insignia of the South Korean Air Force, regularly flew over the roads, strafing anything they saw moving. They flew so low that there was no question in Pickering's mind that if he just stood in the middle of one of the roads he would be seen by one of the F-51 pilots, who would then stand the airplane on its wing, do a quick one-eighty, and then come back and let him have a burst from the eight .50-caliber Brownings in its wings.
The F-51 pilot would logically presume that anyone on these roads was a North Korean. The South Koreans were holed up someplace out of sight. He'd also come across, making his way over the mountains, a dozen or more rock formations that by stretching the term could be called caves. They didn't go deep into the mountains, but far enough so that a family of five or six could go into one of them and not be visible from either the ground or the air.
When one of the South Korean F-51s, or a section of them, caught a platoon, or a company, of North Koreans in the open and strafed them, the dead and wounded were left where they had been hit. There were very few North Korean vehicles of any kind, and the few trucks he had seen- some of them captured 6 6s and weapons carriers-were jammed with the walking wounded. They had kept their arms and used them to guarantee their positions on the trucks.
There was therefore the smell of rotting bodies that seemed to be getting worse, not better, even though it was getting chilly all the time, and freezing cold at night.
There was no question that the tide of war had changed. The North Koreans were not only retreating but bore little resemblance to an organized military force.
So obviously all he had to do was . . .
Make himself invisible to the F-51 pilots, so they wouldn't blow him away. To that end, he had plastered his face and hands with mud, so they would not be a bright spot on the ground to be investigated and strafed. Or maybe just strafed, skipping the investigation, and . . .
Make himself invisible to the retreating North Koreans, who would almost certainly shoot him if they could, not for a military reason but to see if he had anything to eat, and . . .
Wait for friendly troops to come up one of the roads. There were several problems with that. Friendly troops would, like the F-51 pilots, conclude that anybody here in the middle of nowhere was a North Korean. American troops might take such people prisoner. From what he had seen, the South Koreans would not.
The major problem was that he had been on short rations since he'd been shot down, and over the last four or five days the short rations had diminished to zero. And since he had stopped eating, he could feel his strength diminis.h.i.+ng with each step-each labored breath-he took.
He didn't think, in other words, that he was going to make it.
He was not going to give up, but on the other hand there wasn't much difference between what he was able to do and giving up. Unless, of course, he gave up by taking a dive off the nearby cliff or putting the .45 to his temple, and even being hungry, dirty, tired, and sick seemed better than those options. With his luck, he thought, he wouldn't get killed taking a dive off the cliff, he would break both legs and arms and lie in agony for Christ only knew how long.
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