‘Put all those cans and plastic in the truck for me, kid,’ Peddler Grandpa said to Bugeye.
Bugeye dragged the five sacks they’d collected off to the side. After everything was weighed on the scales and Peddler Grandpa paid Bugeye’s mother, Bugeye slung the sacks over his shoulder and carried them to Peddler Grandpa’s truck.
Peddler Grandpa got behind the wheel and asked, ‘You done for the day?’
‘I was sorting stuff.’
‘They’re looking for you.’
‘Scrawny’s mama?’
‘I think she’s with your little brother.’
Bugeye nodded and ran back to his mother to tell her he was off to find Baldspot. Since she’d made him work all day from the crack of dawn, and he was always left to his own devices anyway when it came to dinner, she turned a blind eye and continued with what she was doing, throwing him only a quick glance in acknowledgement. When the truck headlights turned on, Bugeye saw something flying around in the air. He hadn’t felt it through the several layers of work clothes and the cap he wore, but it had begun to snow. Bugeye cried out, his voice trembling with the barest edge of excitement.
‘It’s snowing!’
‘So it is,’ Peddler Grandpa said as he steered the truck away. ‘At least it won’t be too heavy, since it’s the first snow of the year. It’s hard on everyone when it snows a lot.’
On their way from the dumpsite to Scrawny’s house, the snow grew a little heavier. But most of the flakes that landed on the windshield melted right away and turned to water drops. The barking and yapping of the dogs was like a signal for the front door to open and Scrawny’s mama and Baldspot to poke their heads outside. The yard was speckled with snow.
‘Is it a special day?’ Bugeye asked.
Scrawny’s mama set the table with small plates of food and explained, ‘I put up kimchi for the winter today. Since there’s only two of us, I didn’t make that much. But I figured I may as well make a big batch of memilmuk while I was at it.’
‘The Mr. Kims are going to love it,’ Baldspot said, his voice half giggles, as it always was when he was in high spirits. ‘I can’t wait to see that boy again.’
The table was set with the tender, yellow inner leaves of cabbage, leftover kimchi seasoning, and slices of boiled pork belly. Scrawny’s mama sat down at the head of the table and poured Peddler Grandpa a bowl of makkolli. She started to pour some for herself as well, but he snatched the bottle away and, even while asking, ‘Sure you can handle this? Weather’s pretty bad tonight,’ he was already pouring her a bowl, too. Together they gulped down their brew. Then she and the boys headed out—she carrying the big mixing bowl of muk on her head, the boys toting the bottles of makkolli—and made their way towards the patch of woods near the bend in the stream. The slim branches and the dried silver grass were damp to the touch, and the exposed sandy earth was covered in a layer of snow. Just as she had before, Scrawny’s mama walked straight over to the old willow tree, took a swig of makkolli, and sprayed it on the trunk. Her shoulders rose and fell and her body twitched, but this time she didn’t fall backwards or go into convulsions; her voice alone changed and took on a serene tone.
‘Mm, that hits the spot!’
She placed the bowl of memilmuk directly on the ground in front of the shrine, lined up the bottles of makkolli, and called out towards the tall grass.
‘Come on now! Come get your offerings!’
There was a murmuring in the darkness, and shadowy figures emerged. This time, the dokkaebi did not keep their distance but came right up to Bugeye, Baldspot, and Scrawny’s mama. There was the father in his New Village Movement cap, the mother in her baggy floral pants with the kerchief around her head, the grandfather with his white beard, the grandmother, the father’s older brother in his faded suit, the mother’s brother in his army reserves uniform, the younger uncle and his wife, the mother’s sister and her husband, the father’s sister and her husband, the cousins, the older brothers and sisters, and finally, the youngest of the entire family, the child. The family crowded around the bowl of buckwheat jelly, sending a slight breeze over the three of them as they passed by. All at once, the yard in front of the shrine where they stood was filled with people. Each time one of the Mr. Kims came close to them, it felt like nothing more than a cool breeze brushing their skin. And though their faces were a little dark, their skin wasn’t blue or red or anything like that. It was somehow no different from running into neighbours you’d known a long time.
The child’s father came over to Scrawny’s mama.
‘Thanks to you, Granny Willow, our whole family is better now,’ he said.
‘Please eat your fill.’
‘How’ve you been?’ the child asked Baldspot and Bugeye. ‘We’ve been terribly busy.’
‘Doing what?’ Baldspot asked.
‘Bringing in the autumn harvest. Now we can rest until next year’s first full moon.’
‘Eat up, you,’ Scrawny’s mama said.
At her urging, the child bowed his head, slipped back into the crowd of grown-ups, and ate some memilmuk. The three of them watched with satisfaction as the Mr. Kims ate and drank their fill. After they’d enjoyed the muk and drunk all of the makkolli, they lined up again, bade farewell to Scrawny’s mama and the boys, and slowly retreated from the yard in front of the shrine. The child came back over to Baldspot.
‘Would you two like to come see our neighbourhood?’
‘Can we really go with you?’ Baldspot asked with his usual giggle.
‘Just follow me.’
The child walked into the tall silver grass the grown-ups had vanished into, and Bugeye and Baldspot followed without a second thought. No sooner had the dried leaves of the overgrown grass grazed their cheeks than everything went dark and then slowly brightened to a kind of milky glow, though they still could not make out anything. A thick fog surrounded them. The child, who was walking ahead, flickered in and out of view, and from that they could tell that the fog was very gradually starting to thin. The light wasn’t bright or clear as at midday; instead it was a soft, pastel light, like moonlight. To the right a river flowed, and across the river was an open field, and beyond the field was mountain after mountain, all of different heights. Behind the two boys, an enormous hill rose up like a cliff, high and imposing, right above the river’s edge, and in front of them was a sandy inlet, low hills, and sorghum swaying in a field. A winding, curving path was lined with large, lush willow trees. At the end of the path was a small village thick with bamboo. They could see thatched roofs here and there, and at the top of a hill was another village. Bugeye hurried to catch up with the child.
‘Where are we?’ he asked.
The child answered as always with a laugh.
‘Can’t you tell? This is Flower Island.’
‘This is the same island?’ Baldspot asked as he looked around in all directions.
‘Yes, this is what it was like in the old days.’
‘Flower Island in the old days?’
‘That’s what I’m trying to tell you. This is where we live.’
They stopped to look down at the river: there was another neighbouring island with its own low mountain and lush grove of trees. A small sailboat drifted slowly past. A mama cow and her calf nibbled at the grass in a field near the river’s edge, and right on the banks where flowers bloomed, ducks were taking off and landing and dabbling their beaks in the water.
Bugeye took a long look around before saying, ‘I’ve never seen that island before.’
‘People blew it up. Our relatives who lived there moved away long ago,’ the child said. ‘We’ll probably leave this place someday, too.’
The adults who’d been walking ahead all disappeared into their separate houses. The child led Bugeye and Baldspot into the courtyard of an L-shaped house with a thatched roof. The child’s oldest brother was
in the yard chopping firewood, his mother was in the kitchen putting something on to boil in the big iron cauldron, his father was sitting on the narrow side porch smoking a pipe, and his sisters were piling the laundry into a basin and carrying it down to the river. The cow and her calf, the ducks and the sailboat, the family—they all kept repeating the same movements over and over, like a set of moving tableaus on replay.
‘What happened to all the trash, and our shacks?’ Bugeye asked.
‘You can’t see them right now, but they’re there, too. Always.’
The child turned back the way they came and pointed.
‘See how thick the fog is. This awful fog has been covering our whole village more and more often.’
The child pointed towards the opposite end of the village, which was blanketed in the same thick, smoke-like fog.
‘We can’t go over there anymore. A lot of them left, and now it’s just our family.’
The child opened the door to a storage shed; the inside was as big as the grand hall of a Buddhist temple. Small sacks hung from the rafters and crossbeams, filling the entire space from wall to wall and ceiling to floor.
‘This is what we did all autumn.’
‘What? Is that all rice?’
Baldspot’s jaw dropped as he gazed up at the sacks.
‘Those are flower seeds. Our family harvested them. When spring comes, we’ll sow them wherever there’s soil on Flower Island.’
The child led Bugeye and Baldspot back the way they’d come. Bugeye looked back: the hills and mountains and fields and village looked very quiet and very far away, like a painting of a moonlit landscape. The child stopped at the edge of the fog.
‘Farewell. We’ll meet again.’
Bugeye and Baldspot were suddenly swept back into the fog. They pushed their way back through the tall silver grass, only to find themselves lying in the yard in front of the shrine.
‘So you boys finally came to,’ Scrawny’s mama said. ‘It’s cold. Better get up. Time to go home.’
Bugeye and Baldspot stared at each other in bewilderment.
*
The weather grew colder and the days shorter and shorter, making the working conditions that much worse, and causing the pickers to grumble about their languishing wages. They had to work in darkness until late into the early-morning shift, and by five in the evening it was already dark again. Once evening did fall, people gathered in front of the shop and in every clearing in the shantytown to drink hard, and their bonfires grew bigger and burned longer into the night. The hubbub they made was no different, but small conflicts that arose while working were quicker to grow into full-blown fights. Whenever a fight grew, the amount of broken glass and scrap metal and other rough implements lying around meant that the argument would not stop at grabbed collars, but was sure instead to end in spilled blood.
Few days went by without an argument between the Baron and Bugeye’s mother because of the Baron’s unflagging enthusiasm for cracking open another bottle—which he claimed was necessary for him as crew leader to ensure the camaraderie of his workers—and his propensity for gambling late into the night. He usually drank and played card games of Go-Stop with his work crew or the crew leaders from neighbouring districts; but on this particular day, the drinking party had grown to include the leaders of the smaller units from the private truck districts. The private districts were run like individual companies, and the owners of the trucks, who were essentially the CEOs, had a monopoly on all of the trash their trucks collected. They split the profits thirty-seventy with the unit leaders and their work crews, whom they hired as employees. The permit fees for the private sectors were expensive, but the items discarded there were of such high value that those workers made far more money than those assigned to the district dumps. The unit leaders were mostly in their thirties and forties, and were spoiled by their relative wealth. Judging by the way they would all get together and head into town en masse to scare up some fun each time another purchasing day rolled around, they were thick as thieves, to boot.
There was one downside to Baron Ashura’s district sector, and that was having to crush all those aluminium cans, which brought in the same amount of money as plastic. Flattening out the smaller items, like beer cans and food cans which fitted in your hand, was annoying enough; but even the larger items, like oil drums, aluminium bowls, pots and pans, and other sundry metal containers, had to be crushed and flattened one by one so that they could be easily sorted and sold in bulk. That meant hammering them with a mallet or crushing them underfoot, which took a long time. But it just so happened that the Environmental Co-operative team, which collected trash from the U.S. military bases, owned a compactor; for them, the work took mere seconds. The Baron went in search of the Co-op’s unit leader for their work crew. The Co-op had converted a container box into a private office behind the management office. The Baron stepped inside the container to find several unit leaders from various teams sitting around drinking soju.
‘Well, look who’s here,’ one of the men said.
‘What’re you doing here? All the big stuff’s been collected already.’
The men made comments to try to get under his skin, but the Baron ignored them. He gave a nod to the unit leader he was looking for.
‘Bak, you mind if we talk for a second?’
Swarthy, thickset Bak stayed seated where he was and said, ‘What’s with the serious face?’
‘It’s no big deal. I just wanted to ask you something.’
Bak pulled a face, but followed the Baron outside.
‘I have a favour to ask,’ the Baron explained. ‘I was wondering if my crew could share the use of your compactor.’
Bak smirked.
‘I guess you could bring your stuff over and use it. After we’re done with it, that is. But you know, that ain’t going to look too good. Why not just sell us your aluminium instead?’
The Baron thought it over. There were indeed times when they handed items over to the private districts. But they always ended up losing half, or at a minimum one-third, of what they would have made if they’d sold it straight to the recycling plants or to peddlers instead.
‘I would have to talk it over with my crew first,’ the Baron demurred. ‘What about charging us a small fee each time we use it instead?’
Bak chuckled and patted the Baron on the back.
‘Son of a bitch. That’s not a bad idea. In that case, drinks are on you tonight. Can you get some soju from the shop?’
With that, the Baron headed over to the shop, bought ten extra-large bottles of soju, and toted them back to the office. The drinking party that had started without him had all but run out of booze, but there were still plenty of snacks to go around.
Visibly delighted at the arrival of more soju, one of the younger unit leaders offered some meat to the Baron and said, ‘This stuff is called turkey. We get to eat it before those Yanks do.’
His lips and fingers were slick with grease from the shredded turkey meat and thinly sliced pork sitting on wax paper. The table was strewn with oranges, each one stamped with the name of the place where they’d been grown, as well as plums preserved in syrup, and other treats. Bak had probably told the rest of the men why he was bringing them soju. As he drank, the Baron, who was prone to showing off, felt his mood start to lift.
‘We may not make as much as the Co-operative sector or the downtown areas, but our permit fees are the highest of all of the district sectors. Puts my mind at ease to know my workers can make ends meet.’
‘Seems our lordship here has raked in quite the income.’
‘Well, you know, all that cabbage from the kimchi season was a big headache, but once Christmas rolls around, we’ll be back on easy street.’
‘Which sector are you?’ someone asked.
Bak answered before the Baron could. ‘South-east part of the city
, up towards the northern end, I think.’
‘That’s a decent area. Two big marketplaces, and isn’t it basically the heart of that part of the city? Lot of small factories, too, I bet.’
As the unit leaders all chimed in, the Baron slowly forgot that he’d barged in on someone else’s party.
‘We’re the best of the district sectors,’ he crowed.
‘Hey, hey,’ Bak said, changing the subject. ‘Let’s not leave our good crew leader out and only play amongst ourselves. C’mon, get the cards out.’
‘Yeah, let’s get a taste of some of that district money.’
The snacks and booze were pushed to one side, and one of the unit leaders took out a deck of hwatu flower cards.
‘There’re too many of us for Go-Stop, and it takes forever to finish a game. Let’s play Jitgoddaeng or Seotda instead.’
‘Seotda! The rules are simpler, but it’s more exciting.’
‘Okay, but let’s decide on the values of the cards first. If we do it later, we’ll end up arguing about it.’
‘How much should we ante?’
‘100 won is too stingy, and 1000 won is too steep, but 500 won should be just about our speed.’
‘So, if it’s 500 to ante, 500 to stay in the game after you get your first two cards, 500 to swap one of your cards with one from the deck, 500 to stay in the game again with your new card, and another 500 to raise, then the minimum pot is 2,500 won.’
Everyone was talking at the same time as they set the rules. Stones from a baduk set were used as chips, and everyone placed two 10,000-won bills under the board in exchange for forty baduk stones. If anyone ran out of stones, they could buy more from someone else by producing more cash. The Baron saw no danger in playing. He started out with an okay hand and was doing all right in the betting, but then his luck turned, and after a few rounds he was out of money. He lost even more money for a couple more rounds before finally pulling a jangddaeng, two high maple cards. He’d already lost a million or more won, which was the equivalent of blowing about half a month’s earnings. In the next round, two of the men folded after pulling new cards. The remaining four each flipped one of their new cards over, and one more folded. Then, when the bets were raised, another folded. Only the Baron and Bak were left. Just then, the Baron caught the fleeting moment in which one of the men who’d folded quickly slipped a card into Bak’s hand.
Familiar Things Page 10
