by Seong-nan Ha
The restaurant was small with only a few tables. The woman, who had been trimming green onions, called toward the kitchen. “Mr. Kim—the one who supplies us the meat—doesn’t his truck have a Gyeonggi plate that starts with ba?”
An old man poked his face out through the hatch and gazed at me. “Hmm, how should I know? He’ll be coming soon, so why don’t you stick around and ask him yourself?”
While I waited, I helped the woman trim over ten bundles of sesame leaves. When I moved onto the green onions, I happened to look inside the kitchen and caught the man stuffing a dog’s leg into a cauldron billowing with steam.
I stepped outside to get some air. I called my son. I had left the phone close to him so that he could crawl to it. After a little while, he picked up. He said he had already eaten lunch. When I asked what he would like for dinner, he said he didn’t want anything. He sounded completely different from that morning when he’d been crying. In fact, he sounded as if I’d interrupted his fun.
“Mommy, I have to go. My friend’s here outside the window. She just told me something really funny.”
I was about to ask him about this “friend,” but he hung up. A truck pulled up next to my car. The door opened and a middle-aged man stepped out. He had on a hiking hat and rubber boots that went up to his knees. He took out a box of meat from the refrigerated system in the back, hoisted it onto his shoulder, and went into the restaurant. The woman stuck her face out through the restaurant door and gave me a look.
Hurriedly, I looked at the truck’s license plate. It was a Gyeonggi plate, which started with ba, but the numbers after were different. Plus, the words ALWAYS QUICK, ALWAYS RIGHT in white letters on the side weren’t there. The paperboy had said that there had been a blue plastic tarp covering the back, but this one was a custom-built refrigerated truck.
Yeller had been missing for nearly a week. By now, he may have been boiled and sliced into wedges or served up as a stew. I started heading home. Right then a truck cut in front of me, blocking my vision. A blue plastic tarp covered the back. I careened my neck in order to see the license plate. It was a Gyeonggi plate, and the two digits the paperboy had said that followed ba were exactly the same.
I needed to check the side of the truck. But because of all the cars ahead, I couldn’t switch lanes. I had no choice but to follow. The driver drove recklessly. Because he tended to brake suddenly, I almost rear-ended him a few times. The truck started to head in the direction of Dongducheon. I did the same. Bars and cafes lined the streets, and I noticed many foreign tourists walking around. Large armored trucks appeared on the road.
The truck with the blue tarp passed downtown Dongducheon and headed down a secluded road. The occasional restaurant or motel popped up. It then started to climb a lane thick with acacias. I waited a bit, and then started up the lane. At the top of the hill was a wide lot with a few makeshift buildings made of plywood and steel frames. The truck was parked in front of one of the buildings, and a young man, whom I assumed had been driving, was urinating into the woods. He turned to look as I drove up the path. The smell of varnish was overpowering. I’d followed the truck to a furniture factory.
The man straightened his pants and grinned at me, displaying yellow teeth. I purposely turned my car around near the truck. The words NU FURNITURE were painted in large, yellow letters on the side. I started down the hill. Through my rearview mirror, I saw two men hop into the back. They pulled off the blue tarp, revealing a wardrobe with missing doors.
When I opened the lock and went into my son’s room, I found him asleep. He had fallen asleep while drawing. In his hand was a blue pastel crayon. He had drawn himself sitting by a lake, fishing.
In his drawings, he was always stationary. The lake swarmed with all kinds of creatures. There was a goldfish, octopus, squid, scabbardfish, and eel. The octopus had eight legs and the squid had ten. But the boy with the fishing rod had none. It was always this way; he never drew any legs for himself. Instead, he drew a triangle for his body, a circle on top of the vertex for his head, and attached two long arms like squid tentacles to the triangle. Once, my husband had mistaken this figure for a squid, while flipping through our son’s sketchbook. The creatures avoided the fishhook that the boy dangled in the water. He had on a red baseball cap. I had bought him that cap for his third birthday. He was the only person in the drawing.
I turned the page. He’d colored the next page entirely black, and covered it with the symbol for a hot spring, drawings both big and small. The page looked like a sheet of gift wrap. When I looked out of his bedroom window, I saw the same icon strewn across the night sky. All the motels turned on this sign at night. They had started doing this to let people know there was hot water, but from a certain point it had become the symbol for motels.
When Sunday came, my husband just lay in bed. After all, he had no reason to go out to the yard. Dust covered the dog’s bowl; the water inside had long dried up.
The paperboy stopped by the house to collect the subscription fee. He was a tall young man, about twenty years old. He was wearing glasses.
“Any news from the police?” he asked, his eyes magnified behind the thick lenses.
I shook my head as I handed him the payment.
“The police called me twice. They asked me the same questions over and over again, it was annoying. Anyway, I really hope they find the dogs. They used to start barking as soon as I stepped into the street, but it’s too quiet now.”
“Yesterday I saw a similar truck and followed it all the way to Dongducheon,” I said. “The license plate even had the same numbers you’d mentioned.”
“I should have looked more carefully, but I wasn’t quick enough. I wish I could have seen the whole thing. But you saw a similar truck yesterday? With a blue tarp, like that curtain over there?”
I turned my head to look where he pointed. He was pointing at my neighbor’s second-story window. It was the room used by their oldest daughter, who was attending college. The curtain was drawn, but it was red, not blue.
“Didn’t you say it was a blue tarp?”
He blinked a few times. His face soon grew hard, as if he realized his mistake just then.
“That curtain’s not blue, it’s red—” I said.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “Thing is, I’m a little colorblind. I have trouble telling red and blue apart …”
He hurriedly got back on his bicycle and dashed away. His long thin legs moved like scissors. I should have been on the lookout for a truck with a red tarp. But instead, I’d only been looking for one with a blue tarp. And his words about it being a Gyeonggi plate that started with the prefix ba couldn’t be trusted. His eyes were bad. He could have easily mistaken ba for ma.
My son, who’d been nibbling at his food, said all of a sudden, “Mommy, my friend said she wants to take me somewhere fun.”
He was trying to get my attention. It was natural to start telling a few lies at six. Or maybe she was just an imaginary friend he’d made up because he was so bored and lonely. Long ago, I’d had an imaginary friend, too. Anne, Dorothy, Alice …
“So is she coming over today?” I asked.
He grinned instead of answering me.
When I was doing up the padlock, he asked from inside, “Mommy, what’s the code for the lock?”
“It’s your birthday,” I blurted in my rush. After all, there was no way for him to open the door from the inside.
I hurriedly got my car keys and was about to step through the front door when he called out, “Bye, Mommy!”
At the sound of his cheerful voice, I felt better and decided to humor him. “Have fun with your friend!”
I was on the lookout for a truck with a red plastic tarp and a Gyeonggi plate that started with ba or ma. I drove past Goryeo Mountain Cabin Inn twice. The strange thing about memories is that every time I passed it, I thought automatically of the song I’d sung with my husband. I was so focused on finding the truck that I almost ran a red light several
times. When I slammed on the brakes, the car behind me honked and flashed his emergency lights. I saw a truck with a Gyeonggi plate that started with ba and followed it for over half an hour, but in the end, I realized it actually started with ga.
I skipped lunch and sped along the road. I sometimes saw trucks with a blue tarp, but not a single truck with a red tarp. All of a sudden, a truck with a Gyeonggi plate that started with ma squeezed in ahead of me. As it cut in, I saw the words ALWAYS QUICK, ALWAYS RIGHT painted on its side. It didn’t have the red tarp, but it was probably stored away, since there hadn’t been any rain for the past few days. I followed the truck. Soon I passed the Come Again sign that let me know I was leaving Gyeonggi Province.
When I was passing Hongcheon of Gangwon, I realized the truck I’d been following didn’t even have a Gyeonggi plate, but a Gangwon plate. I stopped by a rest area and washed my face in the bathroom. Someone bumped into me. It was only when I was standing in front of a vending machine to get something to drink that I realized my wallet, which had been in my pocket, was gone.
The car ran out of gas and eventually stopped halfway between Woncheon and Daseongri. My husband, who had to leave work early to get me, put gas in the car and didn’t say anything on the entire drive home. It was late when we passed Uijeongbu. We called home, but our son didn’t pick up. It seemed he was fast asleep. We passed Goryeo Mountain Cabin Inn. The windows facing the road shone with yellow light, like the cells of honeycomb oozing with honey. All of a sudden, the title of the song that had been stuck in my head came to me. It was called “With You” by the singer Nam Jin, who had performed the song with comical gestures.
I turned the combination on the lock and opened the door. We were hit with a pungent stench. My husband grimaced and turned away. I groped in the dark to find our boy. I found his short, bony legs. He wrapped his arms around me. His breath was cloying. He mumbled as if he were talking in his sleep.
“She couldn’t stay long today. There were people working in the vegetable garden all day. She said she doesn’t like people.”
•
The police called. They had found all the stolen dogs. The neighbors and I carpooled together to where the police had told us to go. It was a deserted farm a little ways from Uiwang. I’d passed it once while following a truck.
There were over forty dogs locked up inside a chicken coop. I saw the truck parked in the lot out front. The thief had targeted houses in the suburbs, but he’d been caught by a dog owner, returning from an early morning exercise. The owner, though, was neither colorblind, nor wearing thick glasses.
We climbed out of our cars and staggered to the coop, calling our dogs’ names. Our hellish month was coming to an end. My legs buckled for some strange reason. I approached the coop and called in a cautious voice, “Yeller!”
Yeller had gained a lot of weight. He perked up his ears and drew closer to sniff me. He reared onto his back legs, and his tongue poked out through the fence to lick my hand.
I called my husband on the way home. His voice changed right away. He kept asking about the dog.
“I told you, he’s fine. He’s the same. He seems to have eaten well, too,” I said, gazing at Yeller, who sat in the passenger seat.
In his greed to fatten up the dogs, the thief hadn’t slaughtered them right away. There were three from another group of dog owners. The owners were appalled at the sight of the ropes hanging from the zelkova tree out in front. Even a tranquilizer gun was discovered inside the truck. Since all the evidence was discovered, the thief wasn’t able to deny a thing. Greed had led to his downfall.
As soon as I opened the car door, Yeller sprung out and loped around the yard. The yard became alive once more. The excited barking of dogs rang through the street. Yeller barked, too, as if in response.
“I guess someone’s coming?”
The door to my son’s room, which I had padlocked, was open. In my rush, I stepped on the combination lock and tripped, crashing to my knees on the floor. The lock was set to 528, my son’s birthday. A feeling of dread stabbed my heart. I flung the door wide, but the room was empty.
After the police had come and gone, my husband paced the living room uneasily. Yeller, who had been waiting to greet my husband as soon as he came home, sat by the window and kept barking when my husband ran into the house without glancing at him. My husband threw the newspaper at the window. Yeller slowly backed away.
“What the hell have you been doing instead of looking after him?” he yelled.
Sitting in the middle of my son’s messy room, I screamed, “You were hoping something like this would happen, weren’t you? Have you ever hugged him? Even once? I bet you wished something like this would happen!”
Unlike the dog thief, whoever had taken our boy was careful. Though he’d been taken in broad daylight, no one had seen a thing. It was when the children were in school, and those who normally would have been home had gone to the farm to pick up their dogs. The only one from our block who would have been home at that time would have been our child.
The next day, our son still hadn’t come home. The police concluded that he’d been kidnapped. My husband took a leave of absence from work and waited by the phone. We were willing to pay whatever sum the kidnapper demanded. It didn’t matter if we had to sell this stupid house.
I hugged our son’s pillow to my chest and spent the night in his room. He had left his sketchbook behind. His name was written crookedly on the cover. I turned each page and looked carefully at each picture. I caught a whiff of oil pastels.
I looked again at his drawing from the morning the dog had been stolen. The tarp covering the back of the truck was unmistakably red, like fiery flames. I had never once looked at his drawings carefully. I’d only believed the paperboy that a blue tarp had covered the back of the truck. If I’d looked more carefully at my own child’s drawing, maybe I would have doubted the paperboy’s words.
Fishing by the lake. In a spaceship flying between the stars. The night sky filled with the hot springs icon. In Room 301 at Goryeo Mountain Cabin Inn, my husband and I had laughed, singing about building a picture-perfect house. Not once had I asked our son why he had been awake so early that morning. He probably still hadn’t been used to the new house. He might have woken from a nightmare and not been able to fall back asleep. But he had never said he was scared, because he hadn’t wanted to bother us.
I flipped through a few more pages and found a picture he had drawn of me. He’d given me long lashes and painted my lips red, but when I looked closely, I realized it wasn’t me after all. Her curly hair came down to her shoulders, and there was a large mole on the left side above her lip. Was this woman the friend he’d been talking about? She wasn’t an imaginary friend he’d made up after all. He hadn’t been lying to get my attention. I picked up the sketchbook and ran into the living room, where my husband sat waiting by the phone with the detective, who was smoking. They glanced up.
“It’s her! This is the woman who took our son!”
The detective ripped out the drawing and called the station.
The drawing, however, proved not enough to crack the case. My gaze fell on the next drawing in the sketchbook, now exposed by the ripped-out page.
Our child and the curly-haired woman sat under a tree in a garden enclosed by a high stone wall. Judging by the musical notes he had drawn, it seemed they were singing. Flowers bigger than human faces were in full bloom, and behind them on a grassy hill stood a white house, overlooking everything.
The wooden door that led to the walled garden was bolted from the inside with a large padlock. Where was he? But the boy in the picture doesn’t seem to want to reveal the lock combination. I peered at his round face balanced on the vertex of a triangle. His mouth dangled on his chin. A smile stretched from ear to ear, as if he had found happiness at last.
A Quiet Night
When my banker husband, who seemed guaranteed a bright and secure future, submitted his resignation letter and announ
ced he intended to become a carpenter, I couldn’t think of one good reason to talk him out of it. Shyly, like a middle school boy, he revealed that being a carpenter had been his dream since adolescence. It wasn’t like he was saying he wanted to become a professional baseball player; being a carpenter was just as practical as being a banker. But he had never touched a hand plane, and I was certain no carpenter shops nearby would hire an amateur like him, whose only experience with a saw was limited to his time in high school tech class. Plus, there was no longer any reason for us to remain in that dreadful city where we had stayed put only because it was close to his job.
He may never become a master carpenter, but until he became at least a joiner, earning a livelihood fell squarely on my shoulders. I had to transfer twice on the subway and take the bus for another twenty minutes to get to the department store where I worked. If I could save at least an hour of commute time, I could perhaps attempt things I hadn’t dared until now. I had a dream, too, and selling lingerie at a department store wasn’t it.
We were able to get an extra bedroom, since we’d moved from the city to the outskirts. The apartment didn’t face south, but we liked the fact that it had an unobstructed view with no high-rise towers in the way that would block daylight. The realtor told us not only would we have peace and quiet because we were far from the main road, but we also wouldn’t need a fan during the summer because we could simply open the front and back windows for a cross breeze. There was even a large balcony where my husband could practice his carpentry. But more than anything, the department store where I worked was only half an hour away by bus.
Since we were on the second floor, we saw the tops of trees spread below us when we opened the window. My husband had wanted a quiet, private space where he could take in some sun, away from prying eyes, and there were parks both small and large nearby. Still, I didn’t ask whether he’d taken a stroll in any of them while I was gone. All he seemed to be doing was puttering around the apartment, making no real attempt to become a carpenter. A few times I snuck out onto the balcony to check on his progress, but the toolbox, which contained his handsaw and nails, sat tucked away in the corner, and the wood boards were piled in the same spot from the first day he’d brought them home. The balcony, devoid of any sawdust, was spotless.
