Lark and Termite Read Online Free PDF Page A

the walls, he might call back the room itself and lie down in it and wait for her.
    He doesn’t lie down, ever. Sleeping, he props himself upright, ready to jump to his feet. American forces have fallen back seventy miles in seventeen days, no Intelligence involved; they stand, hold, and fall back, ever more decimated. Korea has dropped its mask and filled Leavitt’s head with pictures, sounds, words he’s heard before and words he’s never heard; signals whose crossed lines pass through him in phantom frequencies. You’re the best, babe, the only one—there, right there, babe? Baby? Baby? Remembering Lola’s voice, Leavitt tenses as he walks. He’d listen for baby or Bobby or love or babe or simply yes: one pulsing word rapidly repeated; her breathy, questioning intonations timed to each thrust were a signal she was nearly there. Sounds that were no longer words meant he could let go and stop thinking, pound in hard just where she’d put him inside her . No woman he’d ever been with responded so strongly, so unmistakably, the spasm of her muscles a deep interior rippling that touched off his own wrenching orgasm. Lying still afterward, completely drained, unable to lift his hips, his head, he could move his fingers inside her and play her sensation like a thing he actually controlled.
    The week she told him about the baby, the week before he’d shipped out, they thought he’d be gone a year, doing his time in Occupied Japan. He’d come back to her, to the baby. He’d even hoped, after he arrived in Korea, that specialized status in LIS might help him secure a leave when the baby was born. Lola planned to convince the right people she was in such bad shape that a leave for her husband was advisable. She could be convincing, and old man Onslow had connections; one hand scratched the other in the Kentucky lowlands of Onslow County. Onslow was a fallen Louisville blue blood whose family name graced the county courthouse, and his club filled a definite need at nearby Fort Knox, a straight shot down Highway 31. Onslow knew people and was kin to half of city government; he depended on Lola to keep his girls clean and well advised while he ran sex for soldiers as a sideline business. He’d done numerous favors for the brass at the base, hushing up soldiers’ messes, meeting their particularities with understanding. He shared his windfalls with Lola as though she were his blood or his business partner, or maybe just to buy her silence. Lola was unpredictable—she didn’t live under anyone’s thumb, including Onslow’s. He seemed to approve of Lola’s alliance, probably saw Leavitt as keeping her happy before conveniently disappearing overseas. He didn’t know they had plans until they married, two weeks before Leavitt left. Even then he seemed to assume Leavitt might not reappear, might come to his senses far from Fort Knox and the complications of marriage to a woman like Lola. The baby was proof to the contrary; Leavitt was alive inside her. She’d already talked to a doc who frequented the club; he’d swear she was nearly dead after the birth. The army would ship Bobby back for an emergency leave; he’d do a few more months abroad, and then his rotation would be over; they’d decide together whether he stayed in the military or mustered out.
    It’s laughable now, their plans and schemes. No one is getting out of Korea, not for years. The “specialized” soldiers of Language Immersion Seoul are leading platoons and evacuating villages, shouting orders and instructions. Terrified South Koreans address Leavitt in fast, complex streams of language he can’t understand against a backdrop of artillery and flight. Ihae mot haeyo, he repeats, I don’t understand. Ijjokuro: this way. Hurry. No: naeil. Jigum: now.
    All month he’s carried a snapshot of Lola in the breast pocket of his stinking fatigues, wrapped in a cellophane-encased cigarette pack against the rain: Lola in the hammock they’d strung on the