by Seong-nan Ha
The thief had taken all the dogs from the neighborhood that lived outside. A police officer arrived. He seemed flustered, surrounded by people who raised their voices at him at the same time. Twelve dogs had been stolen. He recorded the breed and value of each dog in his notepad. With the exception of our dog, all eleven were either Jindos or purebreds recognized by the American Kennel Club. Some were worth over several million won. When it was our turn, we hesitated when we were supposed to write down our dog’s breed. Our Yeller wasn’t a Pointer or a Collie. He was a common mutt.
“But our Yeller is different!” cried my husband, who was late for work because of the incident.
His voice shook a little. It seemed he wanted to add something more, but the police officer cut him off.
“How much is he worth?”
My husband said that he’d cost fifty thousand won.
“Seeing that the thief nabbed all the dogs in the neighborhood, he’s probably planning to sell them to a specialty restaurant for their meat. I bet he used a tranquilizer gun, since he took even the guard dogs.”
Since dog soup restaurants typically used mutts for their meat, our Yeller probably played a big part in the officer reaching that conclusion. A woman whose Spaniel had been taken shrieked and sank to the ground. Even after the police left, the neighbors stood around murmuring for a long time. My husband finally left for work around lunch time. Several times he asked that I call him as soon as there were any updates. He started the car and rolled down his window, frowning at me.
“This wouldn’t have happened if our fence hadn’t been so low. Whose idea was it anyway to have a fence this low?”
“You wanted a house with a yard, too,” I snapped. I was also on edge. “And you’re the one who brought the dog home, so quit making such a fuss. We’re not the only ones who lost a dog.”
“But Yeller is different!”
“Of course he’s different. He’s a cheap mutt.”
My husband sped down the street, turned right, and then disappeared. I’d mocked him, but I couldn’t concentrate on my work either. Yeller wasn’t muscular or wiry, but he had such great focus that he caught the ball easily every time you tossed it. You couldn’t help but laugh at the way his eyes sparkled and his tail wagged, as he watched your hand to anticipate the direction of the ball. Though he didn’t look elegant or have a smooth coat, he’d never once gotten sick. But more than anything, he filled the emptiness of our home. The instant I turned into our street from the main road, he recognized my footsteps and started barking. When I stepped into the yard, he dashed toward me as if he’d been waiting all day and rubbed against me. He could even tell my husband’s car from the neighbors’ cars, just by the sound. My husband had changed because of him.
Our son was still sitting under the parasol where I’d left him. I’d completely forgotten about him while we dealt with the police. I rushed to him and helped him up. His pants were wet. He sucked his finger.
“I couldn’t hold it anymore.”
I carried him to the bathroom and sat him down on the edge of the bathtub. His wet pants didn’t come off easily. After I’d finally yanked them off, I turned on the taps and hosed him off with the showerhead. His shirt ended up getting wet. His upper body was much more developed than other six-year-olds, but from the waist down, he had the body of a three-year-old. As if he were now old enough to be embarrassed, he pressed his thighs together in order to hide his nakedness. It was getting more and more difficult to pick him up and carry him to his room.
The afternoon sunlight flooded into the living room. It was still early, but the yard seemed lifeless with not a blade of grass stirring. When I opened the door, it felt as if the dog would come bounding at any moment and lick my hand. My son’s sketchbook was under the parasol. He carried it with him everywhere. While I wiped the lawn chair with a rag, my gaze fell on the sketchbook once more.
In the middle of the page was a large truck. Two men stood in front of it. One was yanking along a dog that looked like Yeller. Another man in a baseball cap stood a little further away. I ran into my son’s room. He was peering at a children’s book, leaning against the wall. I thrust the sketchbook at him.
“Did you wake up early this morning?”
He nodded without a word. He was a quiet boy.
“So it was this truck? The truck that took our Yeller?”
In response, he pointed at the man, who was dragging the dog away.
“Then who’s this?” I asked. “The one with the hat.”
“He saw the truck, too. He’s the guy who delivers the newspaper.”
“Why didn’t you wake me?”
After some time, he finally opened his mouth. “I didn’t want to bother you. You always get angry when I wake you.”
I called the newspaper distribution center. When the phone had rung for a long time, a man’s groggy voice came on the line. He said no one was in at the moment, and to call back around one in the morning.
As soon as my husband returned from work, he stepped into the yard and whistled. Yesterday evening, even before he whistled, Yeller had recognized the sound of my husband’s car and sat waiting at the gate. My husband was about to open our front door, but turned back and sat in the lawn chair. Cigarette smoke rose above his head.
The paperboy picked up the phone. He talked a little fast, as if he were busy. He recalled the truck from that morning, but unlike what my son had drawn, he’d only seen it pull out of the street. He’d done a double take, because he’d never seen the truck before.
My husband and I called the police officer and before he could finish muttering that there were no updates, we cut him off mid-sentence and relayed very single word the paperboy had said.
The police officer said it would be easy enough to track down the last two digits of the truck’s license plate the paperboy hadn’t seen, but he didn’t call for the next few days.
A small vegetable garden separated our house from our neighbor’s. It was thick with weeds, as if it hadn’t been tended. The front door opened and a middle-aged woman popped her head out. She asked if there were any updates. The police hadn’t contacted her either. Through the half-open door, something like a ball of white yarn scampered out. When she clicked her tongue, the ball of yarn went back inside.
“This time, we decided to get a dog we could raise inside. Let’s face it—we’re not getting our dog back. You think the police would waste their time, looking for a bunch of dogs, when the world has enough crime as it is? They don’t even have time to deal with people, let alone animals.”
The woman hesitated for a moment and then opened her mouth again. “Yesterday when we were coming back from our hike, we saw your son. He was singing, sitting right up against the window …”
She seemed about to go on, but stopped. When people learned about our son’s condition, they all got the same expression. My husband stood waiting by the door.
“She’s right. We can’t just wait for the police to call. It’ll be too late then. You think you can do something? I’d go out there myself, but I can’t because of work. I’ll leave the car for you.”
I gave my son his breakfast. I left his lunch in his room, plus a donut he’d have for a snack, and got in the car. According to the paperboy, the truck had a Gyeonggi plate with the prefix ba; the truck had to be somewhere within Gyeonggi. I spread open the map we’d purchased back when we’d been looking for a house. I highlighted the entire Gyeonggi region; it encircled Seoul like a thick band.
I decided to start with the areas around our house. I blindly set out for the main road. When I caught sight of a specialty restaurant, I parked the car and went inside. Three or four of these specialty restaurants stood next to each other on one block.
As soon as I pushed open the door, I was hit with the smell of animal fat. Not yet lunch time, the restaurant was empty. Menu items were plastered on the walls. A woman with bloodshot eyes came out from the kitchen, shuffling along in plastic sandals. I ordered a g
inseng chicken soup and sat at a table, facing the kitchen. There was a gigantic refrigerator the size of a wardrobe. As if she had recently rinsed the tile floor, water was pooled in places, but the overpowering smell of meat, together with the fishy odor of water, turned my stomach. Even the wooden table my elbows rested on were sticky with grease.
When the woman brought the chicken soup, I asked her if a truck with a Gyeonggi plate that started with ba supplied the meat to her restaurant. She grew suspicious and asked all sorts of questions, finally revealing that she’d been getting her dog meat from the same place for the past ten years. She added that they raised their own dogs and said no more. The chicken soup tasted bad. It seemed she was using the same pot to boil the chicken and dog meat. I took a few bites of chicken, but couldn’t stomach it and had to put my spoon down.
I went into the other restaurants on the block, but they all said the same thing. They gave vague answers, busy with getting ready for the lunch rush. At the last restaurant, what looked like fresh meat was piled high in a yellow plastic crate. The instant I saw the hunks of raw meat, bile rose up in my throat. I covered my mouth and ran back to my car. Every commercial refrigerator in a specialty restaurant would be filled with the same kind of meat. All the way home, my head pounded and I felt carsick.
The house reeked of food and human waste; it was coming from his potty. Our son had dozed off while drawing. Hardened grains of rice clung to the edge of the lunch plate. I stepped on something mushy by the foot of the bed. A half-eaten donut. It looked like the Gyeonggi region I’d highlighted on the map that morning. Where could our dog be?
I shook our son awake and heated up some food in the microwave for him. The stench from the restaurants earlier that day hit me again. There was sauce on his chin, but I didn’t have the energy to take him to the bathroom to wash him up.
My husband came home about an hour later than usual. After grumbling about how he’d had to transfer twice on the subway and then take the bus, only to be stuck in traffic because of an accident, he asked if I’d found any leads. I hung up the suit jacket and necktie he handed me, and said that I’d drive out a bit farther the next day.
My husband had trouble falling asleep. He hadn’t been able to tell before, but now that he’d walked home, our street just wasn’t the same. It felt as if he were walking down a dark alley with no lights. It made sense, since there was not a single dog left to bark, even if a stranger were to enter the street. The silent nights continued.
On the third day, I drove to Yeoncheon. With the Hantan River amusement park nearby, there were many specialty restaurants in the area. Every one of these places reeked with the smell of perilla seeds and meat. It was a smell that wouldn’t fade, even if you mopped the floors every day. But no one knew of a truck that had a Gyeonggi plate with the prefix ba.
My eyes were tired from driving, and my right calf was sore from stepping on and off the gas and brake pedals all day. As soon as I came home, I pushed open the door to my son’s room, calling his name, but his room was dark.
I switched on the light, but he wasn’t there. My feet crushed the shrimp crackers he had dropped on the floor. Half-finished drawings, pastel crayons, and crackers were strewn around the room. When I lifted the cloth food cover, I saw his lunch was untouched.
I opened the bathroom door, but he wasn’t there either. I looked in the master bedroom and even the storage room, but he was nowhere to be found. I went out to the yard and called his name. Dread gripped my heart. My legs kept buckling. I ran down our street. The street led to the main road where cars whizzed by. Freight trucks carrying lumber and rebar were constantly barreling down the road at frightening speeds. Someone snatched my wrist. It was my husband. He hadn’t seen our son on his way home from the bus station, either.
“You can’t even look after one kid?” my husband cried, taking in the mess in our son’s room. He yanked off his jacket and flung it to the ground. “How does a kid who can’t even walk disappear? Did he fly away? Did the ground swallow him up? What the hell have you been doing?”
“What have I been doing?” I screamed. “I’ve been looking for your precious dog all day!”
At the dead end, where the houses stopped, was a path that led up to a mountain. My husband took a flashlight and went up the mountain. I walked out onto the main road, all the way to town. I kept shouting our son’s name, but because of all the traffic, I couldn’t even hear my own voice. The town was bustling with students heading home and young people who had come out for drinks. I went into the arcade, but I didn’t see any children. I went into a store and described our child, but no one had seen him.
I came back onto the main road. I looked up and found myself standing in front of several love motels, their parking lots filled with cars. I took the side lane up to Goryeo Mountain Cabin Inn. All the way to the inn entrance, pebbles covered the narrow lane, which was just wide enough for a single car to pass. The pebbles glistened in the streetlight. The pine tree was strung with lights and they flashed on and off in sequence. Standing next to the tree, I glanced at the motel windows. Eight years ago, my husband and I had stayed in Room 301. The room was occupied; orange light escaped through the cracks in the curtain.
“Hey, you know that song?” my husband had said back then, proceeding to sing in his tone-deaf voice, “On that green, green grass, I want to build a picture-perfect house—”
I sang along, “—and live forever with the one I love. When spring comes, we sow seeds—”
What we had wanted was a house with a yard, with children both big and small, who would run and play in that yard. But we decided not to have any more children after our son became ill. When we had laughed and sung in Room 301 at Goryeo Mountain Cabin Inn, we’d had no inkling that our future child would not be able to walk.
“What’s the name of the song again?” he’d asked.
The name had been on the tip of my tongue. “‘On That Green, Green Grass’? No, ‘A Picture-Perfect House’? That doesn’t sound right either.”
On my way home, I hummed the tune, which was now stuck in my head. I started singing louder and louder. Trucks roared past me. A bus carrying just two or three passengers rattled by. Desperately, I kept singing.
Our boy was lying on the sofa. My husband, who had been smoking while pacing the yard, saw me and ground out his cigarette with his shoe. He’d found him in the corn field halfway up the mountain.
His entire body was covered with dirt. It seemed he had crawled out the door, all the way up to the field. I stripped off his clothes and sat him in the tub. He kept dozing off, utterly exhausted. I felt a surge of both relief and anger. As I washed his two bony legs, I had to clench my teeth together. With a soapy washcloth, I scrubbed his skin until it turned red. Even as he twisted in pain, he didn’t complain or cry out. His eyes were full of tears.
“If it hurts, tell me it hurts. Why did you crawl all the way there? Did you want to scare me to death? You damn—”
The word cripple rose to my throat, but I swallowed it. His knees and elbows were skinned raw, and there were bruises all over his body, as if he’d bashed into rocks. As I was carrying my naked son out from the bathroom, I slipped and banged my knee on the floor. He flew out from between my arms like a bar of soap and landed a few feet ahead. My husband, who had been smoking outside, rushed in. He picked the boy up and carried him to his room. I cleaned his wounds and put ointment on them. He fell asleep crying. By the time I’d bandaged him up and finally stepped into our room, it was past midnight.
I pulled back the covers and crawled into bed. My husband grunted and turned over. “This is exactly why I don’t feel like coming home. What was the point of getting a yard and a dog? It was pointless. Completely pointless from the beginning.”
“Don’t worry. Even if I have to search the ends of the earth, I’m going to find that dog and bring him back.”
I bought a three-digit combination lock from the hardware store, as well as a hasp latch for the do
or. I kept dropping the nail or it kept bending under the hammer. Our boy watched from the living room, trembling each time the nail flew out. I tried again, pinching the nail between my fingers, but I struck my thumb instead. My thumb started to swell immediately, turning blue. Sucking it, I said to my son, who was sitting behind me, “If you had a treasure, something really valuable, what would you do?”
“I’d hide it. So no one can find it.”
“That’s right. I’d put it in a safe no one can open. A safe only Mommy can open.”
He didn’t say anything. All he did was watch uneasily as I moved the television and telephone from the living room to his room. I wrote down my husband’s and my cell phone number in big numbers on a piece of paper and stuck it on the wall.
“If something happens, just call these numbers, okay? This is only while we look for Yeller. If you’d woken us that morning, none of this would have happened. And if you hadn’t crawled up the mountain, I wouldn’t have to do this right now. Just hang on. When we find Yeller, everything will be okay.”
When I picked him up and tried to carry him to his room, he burst into tears and started to swing his arms and scream. I ended up getting struck in the face and my nose started to bleed. Stunned, he stopped crying. I changed him out of his blood-stained shirt and put his lunch, snack, and potty inside his room.
I closed the door and was scrambling the code on the lock when he called out from inside. His sobs made him difficult to understand.
“So I’m your treasure, Mommy?”
“Of course you are! You’re my most valuable treasure!”
I got in the driver’s seat. I took out the map from the center console and spread it open. Yeoncheon and Pocheon. I’d circled the places I’d already searched. After I’d wet a tissue with saliva and rubbed the blood off my nose, I started out toward Uijeongbu. I spotted two small specialty restaurants. One wasn’t open yet, and the sickening odor of boiling meat wafted from the other one.
