by Seong-nan Ha
Two jeeps were stopped on a narrow, deserted trail. The interior lights were on, but I couldn’t see inside because the windows were fogged up. The door of one of the cars flew open and a girl in high heels and an ankle-length parka scrambled out and made a run for the woods; she didn’t get far. She slipped and fell backward. Even in the dim taillights, I could tell who she was. Though her eye makeup had smeared down her cheeks, it was the girl from Mother Earth Tearoom. Someone inside the car swiped at the fogged-up window. Through the small opening that formed, a face appeared. It was Kim Jinseong.
He climbed out of the jeep, zipping himself up, and then with a shotgun slung over his shoulder, he went after the girl. Judging from the way he staggered, he was very drunk. Even the girl, who’d fallen on her rear-end and was now backing away, was just as drunk. He aimed the shotgun at her face. “Bang!” he cried.
The door of the second jeep opened and a middle-aged man snickered at them. He was drunk, too. The girl meekly climbed back into Kim Jinseong’s jeep. She was like a bird caught in a snare. All of a sudden, the headlights of the jeep flashed on and off. I blocked the blinding light with my hand and quickly ducked. Kim Jinseong, who had been climbing into his jeep, turned and looked in my direction. He yelled to the other jeep, “Hurry! The searchlight!”
“You crazy? What if we get caught?”
“Do what I say. I just saw a deer!”
“The Deer? What’s the matter with you? He’s dead. Are you that wasted?”
“No, a real deer! I just saw the scared-shitless eyes of a deer! I told you to turn on the searchlight!”
The drunk Kim Jinseong was reckless. Even before the searchlight came on, he fired a round in my direction. I hid in the ditch. The bullet tore through a branch right above me. Water seeped through my clothes and soaked my chest. The searchlight was blinding.
“Shit, I lost him! Lee, turn it that way! There!”
I army-crawled along the ditch. My face became covered with mud. I tasted mud. I couldn’t move quickly. My body had grown sluggish since completing my army service eight years ago. I wanted to shout for help, but I knew no one would hear me. The houses were too far away. I recalled the faces of all those who had gathered in Mr. Kim’s yard. Their angular jaws, large eyes, and thick lips—spooked deer, every one of them. In moments of danger, deer duck their heads. All of a sudden, I thought of something. The man who’d first given me a ride to the village in his truck, he’d been terrified of the woods at night. His reaction had been almost exaggerated. Even Mr. Kim had told me many times not to go walking around at night. They all knew. They all knew how The Deer had died. Another gunshot rang out. Gravel exploded. I knew those guns weren’t registered. So even if there were another hunting accident, they wouldn’t be able to trace the crime back to them. The girl from the tearoom was there, but she was drunk and scared. The searchlight whipped across the woods.
“There! It’s a wild boar! It had yellow eyes!” shouted Kim Jinseong.
They were experts. But they weren’t just any experts. They could tell what kind of animal it was just by looking at the eyes. They went the other way into the woods to chase after the boar. I had to flee to where the jeeps couldn’t go. Park’s body had been found in the opposite direction from the village. He must have thought the same thing and fled deep into the forest where the jeeps couldn’t follow him. And while he’d run further away, his life had drained out through the small wound in his thigh.
The cotton padding of my parka sagged with rain. Walking became more difficult under its weight. But I couldn’t just discard it here. They would roam through the forest all night, and if they learned that someone had seen their faces, they wouldn’t stop until they caught me. I broke out into a cold sweat under my drenched underclothes.
In the rain and the dark, I lost my bearings. I had no choice but to press even deeper into the dark. Maybe I was hearing things, but there seemed to be footsteps coming after me. I tripped and rolled down a knoll. I hit my head on the base of a tree and cut my forehead open. The blood from the gash mixed with the rain and trickled into my mouth. It tasted salty and fishy.
I seemed to be stumbling around in circles. Another shot rang out behind me. I had to keep moving to avoid getting hit or dying of exposure.
It was only when I tried to lift my foot that I realized it was stuck. The miry mud clung to my ankle and wouldn’t let go. When I tried to pull my boot free, my foot slipped out of the boot instead. I’d lost all feeling in my wet feet a long time ago.
After barely managing to cross the muddy field, I started to climb a low hill, but stepped on something slick and slipped again. I tried to get up, but my palm, which I’d thrust out, slipped as well, and I fell back. When I lifted my hand, something soft and mushy came away between my fingers. Though it was dark, I could tell what they were. I groped the ground. Everywhere I touched was covered with pine mushrooms. I recalled the muddy boots that had been sitting under Park’s porch. Park, who knew these woods like the back of his hand, could have avoided the mud. But the only way to get to the mushroom patch was to cross the mud field. I had stumbled upon the mushroom patch that had eluded even his mother. The mushrooms were so big that some of them were fifteen centimeters long. I started laughing. I couldn’t stop laughing.
It was around dawn when I finally made it to Park’s house. The rain had stopped, too. Far below, several jeeps were slipping out of the village along the lower road. Sensing my presence, Park’s elderly mother opened the door to her room and peered out. I could tell from her expression how frightful I must have looked. She told me later that she’d thought I was a rebel fighter. My legs gave out and I collapsed onto her living room floor, saying the same words over and over again. “I found it, I found it!”
Early in the morning, two days later, I was sitting in the back of a truck heading to town. I would be back in Seoul by evening. I liked nights in Seoul, because they weren’t pitch black. Jeeps were heading into the hunting grounds in single file. A heavy fog half-shrouded the woods I’d blindly roamed two nights ago. Had it really been a hunting accident? Two months before Park’s death, the deer farm had burned to the ground. There wasn’t a single deer left to hunt. Park was helping the hunters. When they became drunk out of their minds, they had probably started to go after a human deer. The police will uncover the full story. That night when I was fleeing through the woods, it wasn’t the boar, bear, or tiger that I most feared. I’d only wished that I wouldn’t come across another human being.
Never go for a walk in the woods at night. Especially when it rains. An accident could happen at any moment. A creature spewing double barrels of fire could come and set off a deafening roar. Rabbits, raccoons, boars, roes, and deer are slaughtered all through the night. But an entirely different animal could end up dead.
The truck bounced up as if it had rolled over a big rock. I bounced up, too. My tailbone started to ache. The gash ran through my eyebrow and stopped just above my eye. The other detective had known everything. He’d quit after he’d gotten spooked in the middle of the investigation. He’d known exactly what went on in the woods during those rainy winter nights. That sneaky motherfucker. He’d given me every detail about the case, except the most important thing.
O Father
Back then, I had two fathers. One was my biological father, who, on a whim, quit his job at the company and lounged around all day, lying on his belly on the heated floor, while thumbing through slim Japanese magazines or books like Shintaro Ishihara’s Season of the Sun. Then there was Father God, whose countless eyes roamed the earth, watching over his people’s every move from heaven above.
Father number two gathered all the neighborhood children every Sunday and gave out Kool-Aid drinks, candy, and fistfuls of sour plums. Father number one passed onto me his fondness for seafood and trained me by supplying just enough hardships to overcome. It was also thanks to him that I ended up with my secret, unusual complex.
•
The Baptist
church stood in the middle of a large, undeveloped field. I went there every Sunday, rain or shine. Sometimes my mother put my youngest sister on my back and forced me to take her. There was nothing but vacant land past the residential area with its clusters of houses, no shelter whatsoever to escape the harsh wind during the winter, or the scorching sun during the summer. When I look back now, I don’t know why I persisted in going week after week without ever missing a Sunday, but I can still see the red brick building, standing in all its glory like a mighty fortress, its gigantic cross surging into the sky as if to pierce it. At seven years old, I was completely awestruck. The church was the largest building in our neighborhood at the time.
It took about forty minutes for me to walk to the church, and by the time we got there, my youngest sister would be dangling from my rear end, having slipped from her wrap. My middle sister would have lagged behind, complaining that her legs hurt before we even arrived at the church.
My middle sister was sickly and always fell asleep during the sermon, missing the snack time that followed. When the teachers hauled over the plastic bucket sloshing with Kool-Aid, the children climbed onto the wooden benches in excitement. We drank out of a plastic bowl one at a time, but because of all the waiting mouths, we were forced to empty the bowl quickly without taking the time to savor the taste. My sister didn’t wake up, even though her turn had come. One teacher, out of a sense of duty to give every child a taste, brought the cold bowl to her lips, but she only whined and turned away to fall back asleep.
When many children showed up at the church, the teachers added tap water to the half-empty bucket. Those in the back got a watered-down version, but no one complained. Food was scarce back then. If there were rumors that candy was being handed out somewhere, children didn’t think twice about walking an hour to get there. The church couldn’t afford to skip giving out snacks for even one week. If it did, half the children would be missing the following week. This was the situation only thirty years ago.
My middle sister would wake up only after the bowl had gone all the way to the end. She would then start to cry, thinking of what she’d missed. We were only a year apart, but she looked about three years younger than me. She was far below the average weight and height. When she started to cry, I took her by the hand and got her in line to drink the Kool-Aid at the bottom of the bucket.
She first became ill when she was in second grade. She’d gone on a school field trip and bought ice pops that cost ten won for two; from that point she suffered from chronic stomach pain that lasted until she entered seventh grade. Because she was always clutching her stomach, she became permanently hunched over by the time she entered middle school. Purple antacid bottles, which smelled of mint, rolled here and there around the house. She stayed behind in the classroom during gym class, and on sports days, it was our mother who participated instead, entering the mothers’ race to perhaps win something like a wicker basket, while my sister remained inside.
After eighth grade, my sister grew as tall as me, and went on to surpass me. She, who’d cried at the drop of a hat, became even defiant at times. At some point, I found myself gazing up at her. When she started to tower over me, my words no longer had any effect on her. I tried threatening her, but it was no use.
•
Our whole family, minus our father, got baptized. We were all in high spirits as we loaded the food onto the rented bus; it felt as though we were going on a picnic. The bus stopped near a river in Daepyeong-ri. There was a red tinge to the water from the recent rains. We kneeled in the water before the reverend, who stood with water up to his knees, and were baptized in the Baptist tradition. They said that when you went into the water, your sins were washed away and you died to the old way of life, and when you came out of the water, you started a new life as God’s children.
My youngest sister was only eight months old then. With my sister in her arms, Mother waded into the water and kneeled before the reverend. The reverend took the squirming infant and raised her high in the air. Later on television, I saw a similar scene from Alex Haley’s Roots.
The reverend plunged my sister into the river, then pulled her out. The shocked baby screamed belatedly. My middle sister and I, who’d swallowed some water just before, gazed at our baby sister, who wouldn’t stop bawling. I didn’t have the energy to go to her.
My middle sister kept coughing and jabbed me in the side. With her hair and clothes sopping wet, she looked exhausted. She frowned and clicked her tongue, as if the whole thing was completely absurd.
“So even a small baby like that has sin?”
She still seemed upset for having been forced underwater for no apparent reason.
“Be quiet if you don’t understand,” I scolded her. “It’s because of original sin.”
I was simply repeating the words I’d picked up somewhere; it was before I knew what original sin meant.
From the time I was five to eighteen years old, we lived in a new housing development, built quickly to be sold for a handsome profit. They were Western-style bungalows, identical in everything from the number of rooms to the locations of the windows; even the doorknocker mounted on the front gate—a lion head with a ring in its mouth—was the same. There were two rows of ten houses that faced each other, and our house was the very last house on the small street. My father, coming home late after drinking, sometimes opened the gate of the house next door and hollered for me.
Seven-year-old Mi-eum, whom I’d met and gotten to know at church, lived in the house across from us. We started elementary school together, with identical handkerchiefs tucked into our breast pockets, and as we grew older I noticed his chest broaden, his voice grow deeper, and his Adam’s apple jut out. Whenever there was any kind of test or competition, Mi-eum called or stopped by my house to ask how I’d done. He seemed to consider me his rival.
During the summer, the church held Vacation Bible School. On the last day, prizes were given out for attendance and test results. The early morning prayer class started at five in the morning every day; Mi-eum and I never missed a day. We sometimes had to wait outside, because the teacher hadn’t arrived yet to open the doors.
Around this time, big and small churches cropped up in the neighborhood, and many children went to two, even three, different churches during the summer. If I heard a certain church was holding a singing contest, I was there, and if I heard another church was holding an art competition, I was there as well. But because the teachers were well aware of what was going on, the first prize usually went to their own congregants. The prizes weren’t anything special—perhaps a cheap framed picture of Jesus standing in the midst of a flock of sheep, or David poised before Goliath—but when you had won and were walking home with it in your hands, you were so happy you could fly.
On the last day of Vacation Bible School, we were tested on everything we had learned that summer. The questions were easy enough, but the last question was a problem.
As God’s child, what would you like to do or be?
Perhaps I had watched too many television dramas or perhaps it was just my nature, but I wrote without thinking: I want to spread the Good News to the ends of the earth. Even as I wrote, I felt a little ashamed. The Good News? And to the ends of the earth? It’s obvious now, but even back then, I had absolutely no desire to do anything of that sort.
The results were announced. The teacher looked around the room and said that two people had received perfect scores on the test—Mi-eum and me. “However,” she added. Only one prize had been prepared, so she’d been forced to pick one person. When I glanced over at Mi-eum, he looked tense.
“So I had to use the last question to decide. The prize goes to …”
I still remember the way he looked when he realized it wasn’t him. He ran home after class without waiting for me. I approached the teacher, clutching the pastel crayons I had won. I wanted to know his answer to the last question.
“Teacher, I feel bad for Mi-eum … I was wondering, how
did he answer the last question?”
The teacher flashed Mi-eum’s paper at me. I want to come in first at Vacation Bible School. At the very least, Mi-eum was honest. But back then, I merely laughed at him inside.
•
I saw Mi-eum again in my first year of college. It was the first time I’d seen him in six years, since we had moved away when I was in eleventh grade. He looked the same as he always had. We had dinner together.
His father used to joke and refer to me as his daughter-in-law. Once in high school when I had run into him on the bus, he had mortified me by trying to get me to sit in his lap. Mi-eum and I caught up with each other. At twenty-four, I was only in my first year, but Mi-eum had already gotten his undergraduate degree and was in graduate school.
He had always trailed me, but he was now ahead in every aspect. I had never gone on a single date, even after joining the work force straight after high school, while he’d racked up plenty of experience and was even dating someone. When he talked about his girlfriend—a woman three years older than him from the same university—how he had passed her on campus, fallen instantly for her, and had followed her around for a whole year, I realized he was no longer the Mi-eum I had known.
I thought he would remember what had happened at Vacation Bible School, but he couldn’t. Only after I’d described the situation to him in detail did he chuckle, flashing his white teeth. I pretended I didn’t know and asked, “What did you write that day anyway?”
“I wrote, ‘Please let me come in first.’ You happy now?”
Mi-eum was as honest as ever.
•
After we moved, I often dreamed about our old house. Thirteen years isn’t a long time, but when you’re five, thirteen years is as long as 130 years. Overnight, at the age of eighteen, I found myself in an unfamiliar neighborhood. From then on, time passed very quickly.
