Familiar Things

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  He walked along the outer wall of the entire floor, searching all around, and crisscrossed each narrow, labyrinthine aisle that cut through the displays in the centre of the floor. Where had that brat gone? Now on the verge of tears, Bugeye headed back down again, retracing his steps over each floor. By the time he returned to the ground floor, Bugeye was worn out from worry and anger. He squatted down by a pillar when, from somewhere, a familiar wail met his ears. He sprang up and ran towards the sound. He spotted a blue cap surrounded by a ring of people. Baldspot was crying, and a tall young man in a necktie was holding their shopping bag. Bugeye grabbed Baldspot’s hand.

  ‘There you are!’ he said. ‘Why are you crying?’

  ‘That man took my game. He says I stole it.’

  Bugeye gave the man a menacing look.

  ‘Where’s your receipt?’ the man demanded.

  Bugeye deliberately pulled out his wad of cash along with the crumpled receipt from his jacket pocket.

  ‘See,’ he said, unfurling the receipt. ‘I bought it for him.’

  ‘Ah, so you did …’

  The employee had probably spotted a little boy in a cheap parka running with a shopping bag, and got suspicious. As Bugeye led Baldspot towards the exit, he turned and shouted at the employee loudly enough for everyone standing nearby to hear.

  ‘Arsehole!’

  As soon as they were outside, Bugeye felt dizzy and thirsty.

  ‘Where the hell did you go?’ he said to Baldspot.

  ‘Hyung, you took off without saying anything! I thought you went downstairs without me, so I ran down to look for you.’

  They went across the street and into a fast-food restaurant. They placed the hamburgers and French fries and sodas they’d ordered on a table facing the window, and gazed out at the parade of cars and people outside. As he ate, Baldspot’s face was beaming again, as if he hadn’t been bawling his eyes out just a moment ago.

  ‘Hey, this is tasty. I wish I could eat this every day,’ he said with a giggle.

  ‘Is this the first time you’ve had a hamburger?’

  Baldspot nodded. Bugeye felt like he was Baldspot’s father; he imagined for a moment that his own father had brought them there. His eyes burned, and he turned his head and pretended to be looking around the inside of the restaurant. He spotted another group of girls. There were three of them, all dressed in school uniforms and chattering with each other. But for some reason he felt different from the way he had before, and merely gazed at them the way a grown-up might. He felt like he was watching a movie, and he could not enter the screen. Already the brief winter sun was setting, and dusk was falling over the city streets. The lights on the trees glittered even more brightly than in the day, and the displays in the shop windows floated like paintings in the dark.

  6

  New Year’s passed, and the snow that had fallen all winter long finally stopped, giving way to better weather. The adults all talked about how the wind was no longer biting. When the snow fell, it buried the trash beneath it, making it much harder to sort out and collect items, and the ground could not be flattened back down and covered with fill dirt. The dirt that was spread quickly congealed with the snow and turned to sludge; the only alternative was to leave the exposed trash to freeze in place. Still, every day, more trash was poured on top of the old trash. As the weather warmed, the snow and ice below would melt and form air pockets, and cave-ins would happen with increasing frequency. The adults talked about bringing in backhoes to tamp down the trash. The rush of the New Year’s holiday passed, and the trash pickers of Flower Island all waited for spring.

  Before New Year’s, Bugeye’s mother was able to switch from the district sector to a private sector. The company was called Central Recycling, and those who paid the permit fee were assigned to a garbage truck and put in charge of that truck’s work unit. Profits were split among the unit leaders and their teams. Each company president owned ten or twenty trucks, and took the items that the work units and their leaders collected to either recycle themselves in their own recycling plants or sold them to bigger factories. Everyone called them the Flower Island chaebols, the big CEOs of the trash world, and the districts their privately owned trucks collected from were the city’s cream of the crop. Naturally, ownership of these districts was strictly guarded, so not just anyone could get access to those dumps. Bugeye’s mother was a clever and determined woman who shrewdly managed the items that came from her assigned truck. She had a dozen people working under her. Rumour had it that when the Baron went to prison, he gave over half of the money in his account to her, and everyone agreed that it was the natural and logical thing to do.

  That night, when Bugeye and Baldspot returned from their outing in the city, they told their mother about the money they’d found in the trash; she immediately pulled back the linoleum to see for herself. Bugeye added the remaining cash in his pocket to the hiding spot. His mother calmly announced that once the weather warmed up, they would rent themselves a room in the village across the stream and move out of the shantytown. From that point on, she renamed Baldspot ‘Lucky.’ She still sometimes called him Yeong-gil, but more often she would say, Where’s Lucky gone off to? Though she didn’t scold Bugeye for taking Baldspot with him and spending some of the cash, she declared herself in charge of the money from then on, and said they would use it sparingly. Otherwise, she pointed out, their neighbours might know something was up. For poor people, money that had been thrown away could rightfully belong to anyone. Bugeye and Baldspot, in turn, stuck to the vow they’d made to each other, and did not breathe a word of the Mr. Kim dokkaebi or Scrawny’s house to their mother.

  Now that the work was getting easier again, the only work Bugeye, Baldspot, and their mother had to do was sort and gather the items that her unit collected from the dumpsite. Their mother went to work by herself in the morning, and the boys joined her from afternoon to evening. Since moving to the private sector, Bugeye had been bumping into Mole more often while at work. Mole’s job was to assist his older brother, who was a member of their father’s private-sector work unit. Bugeye was transporting a sack filled with plastic bottles when Mole slunk over and sat near him.

  ‘Hey, Bugeye, let’s go into town today.’

  ‘Why? What’s up?’

  ‘There’s a movie I want to see.’

  Bugeye feigned indifference.

  ‘Been a long time since I even watched TV. What’s so great about this movie?’

  ‘It’s called Star Wars. Supposed to be really good. The middle schoolers won’t stop talking about it.’

  ‘Hang on.’

  Bugeye restacked the scrap metal and cardboard, covered it with a tarp, and stood up. Then he ran home, changed his shirt, and rejoined Mole. They crossed the bridge over the stream and caught the next bus into town. A middle-aged man who looked like he’d had a little too much to drink yelled at them.

  ‘Hey, why can’t you Flower Island jerks get your own bus? Stop stinking up ours!’

  Undaunted, Mole hollered right back, ‘Fuck off, you old prick!’

  The man was stunned to find himself confronted by such a young punk, and muttered under his breath for a moment before falling silent. They got off at the town bus stop and walked over to the main street.

  ‘I’ll get the tickets if you pay for dinner,’ Mole said.

  ‘What do you want? There’s a place in the market that serves blood-sausage soup.’

  Mole immediately nodded. ‘They say pork fat is the best thing to eat after you’ve been breathing in a lot of dirt.’

  ‘Says who?’

  ‘My older brother, for one. Sometimes he boils a whole hunk of pork, and eats it with a bottle of soju.’

  They headed first to the blood-sausage soup restaurant and got a seat in the corner. There were no other dinner customers; the only people there were three elderly folk who looked like t
hey worked in the marketplace. They were drinking soju and eating slices of boiled pig’s head. When the woman who ran the restaurant came to their table, Bugeye ordered two bowls of blood-sausage soup.

  ‘And a bottle of soju,’ Mole added.

  ‘What?’ the woman said. ‘Nothing doing. You two are underage.’

  One of the men at the other table glanced over in his drunken haze and butted in.

  ‘Aw, go ahead and give it to them. We won’t tell anyone. How old are you two?’

  Mole shrunk his head down into his shoulders like a turtle and muttered, ‘Eighteen.’

  ‘Hell, that’s old enough to enlist in the army. When I was in middle school, we used to get drunk off our rockers on makkolli.’

  Bugeye and Mole silently ate their soup. After they’d spooned up every last drop, they headed back out as Bugeye grumbled.

  ‘Dumbarse, why’d you have to say we’re eighteen? So embarrassing … Look, do you really want soju?’

  ‘When I saw what they were having in there, I just wanted a taste.’

  At the first hole-in-the-wall shop they came across, Bugeye ran inside and came out with a bottle of soju. He handed it to Mole.

  ‘A little something for the movie.’

  Inside the theatre were only a handful of kids and their parents; nearly all of the seats in front were empty. Bugeye and Mole stuck their feet up on the backs of the seats in front of them and sprawled out. While the hero of the movie travelled through outer space and defeated imperial robots with a light sabre, Mole and Bugeye passed the soju bottle, concealed in its black plastic bag, back and forth. Their stomachs grew warm, and their cheeks flushed. Bugeye had gotten drunk once before on makkolli that the women in the market alleyways gave him as a joke, but this was his first taste of soju. He was guessing that Mole had drunk it before. After each big swig, Mole let out a throaty kyaaa, as if he knew his way around a bottle. By the time they emptied the bottle, the alcohol was hitting them hard.

  ‘I feel really warm.’

  ‘My head is pounding.’

  They kept cackling and punching each other on the shoulders, not hiding how drunk they were. The hero piloted a fighter plane and fired a missile at a weak spot on the empire’s huge, ball-like space station, and the screen filled with flames as the movie drew to a close. Bugeye and Mole left the theatre and boarded a bus, limp of limb but still high of spirit.

  ‘I dunno why I’m not getting any taller. I go to bed each night and wake up every morning, but I’m still just a little kid,’ Mole grumbled.

  Bugeye thought about how the older boys back home used to cause trouble the moment they started growing pubic hair, and how the ones who left the neighbourhood or stopped showing their faces around town once they turned nineteen would pretend not to know the younger boys on the rare occasion that they did bump into each other. Bugeye had already wised onto the fact that becoming a grown-up did not mean good things were waiting for you. He and Mole crossed back over the stream, and were on their way to the dumpsite when they saw the red flashing lights of an ambulance and a crowd of people in front of the management office. A familiar-looking picker from one of the private sectors spotted Mole in the crowd.

  ‘Hurry! Your brother got hurt!’

  ‘My hyung?’

  Mole squeezed through the crowd and ran toward the ambulance. Bugeye followed on his heels. Mole’s father was standing in front of the ambulance; Mole’s brother had already been loaded inside. Mole called out to his brother and jumped into the back while his father explained to someone dressed in a white coat that they were family. Before the paramedic closed the back door, he said, ‘We can only take one person.’

  The door shut and the ambulance took off, siren wailing. It turned out that as the last truck of the day was dumping its load, the ground beneath it had caved in, and the truck had tipped—right onto Mole’s older brother as he was guiding the driver.

  ‘We have to be careful now that it’s spring. The whole place is covered in layers of coal ash and ice, so there are air pockets everywhere.’

  ‘Why haven’t those arseholes brought in the heavy equipment yet? They need to tamp down the ground.’

  ‘Tell me about it. There’s so much gas escaping from underneath the trash now that I can barely breathe when I’m working.’

  Everyone was chattering loudly. Bugeye asked one of the older unit members if he knew what had happened. The man said he saw everything.

  ‘Betcha he loses his legs. He was trapped under there for a good twenty minutes. The only equipment we had was a bulldozer and an excavator, so we were barely able to push the truck off him.’ He lowered his voice and added, ‘When we pulled him out, his legs were shredded.’

  Bugeye joined the dispersing crowd and headed back to the shantytown. When he got home, the light was on in his mother’s room, and he could hear a series of electronic pings and trills coming from his and Baldspot’s room. He stuck his head into his mother’s room first.

  ‘There was an accident … Someone was crushed by one of the Co-op trucks.’

  ‘I heard. We all have to be careful. You eat?’

  ‘I did.’

  He closed the door, afraid to talk too long for fear that she’d smell the alcohol on his breath. When he went into his own room, Baldspot was lying on his stomach with a pillow under his chest, completely absorbed in playing Super Mario Bros. He’d gotten so good at it that he’d passed nearly all of the obstacles and difficult parts, and was nearing the final castle. His goal lately had been to reach the last spot where he would be greeted with fireworks and fanfare. Bugeye lay down next to him and watched him play.

  ‘Hey, hey,’ he said, ‘There’s a sewer pipe. If you go inside, you’ll find a secret world.’

  ‘I know …’ Baldspot started to say, but then he rolled away and shouted, ‘Ew, you stink! Hyung, were you drinking?’

  ‘Shut up. Mum’ll hear.’

  While Baldspot was distracted, Mario was killed by some kind of lizard monster, and fell down a cliff.

  ‘You made me die!’ Baldspot said, finally putting the game down.

  ‘Have you been to Scrawny’s house lately?’

  ‘Yeah, Scrawny’s mama is sick. She’s not talking.’

  Over New Year’s, Bugeye had gone with Baldspot to Scrawny’s house for a holiday meal of rice-cake soup, and after dark had briefly seen the Mr. Kim dokkaebi down by the bend in the stream. But ever since his mother had changed sectors, Bugeye had taken to going into town whenever he had free time, and had all but stopped dropping by to see Peddler Grandpa.

  ‘What about the child?’

  ‘The Mr. Kims are busy now that spring is coming. They say the bad fog is spreading over more of their village.’

  ‘Their village … Was it really there? Did we just dream it all?’

  Bugeye was still doubtful, but Baldspot giggled and said, ‘I dreamed about that department store you took me to.’

  A few days later, Bugeye had finished work and was heading home when he saw Mole stumbling along the path ahead of him. A group of women standing in front of a shack whispered amongst themselves and stepped out of his way. Bugeye passed his own shack and kept going, keeping a careful distance as he followed Mole. Just as he suspected, Mole left the shantytown and staggered up the hill. When Bugeye hurried to catch up to him, Mole turned and threw his arm around Bugeye’s shoulder.

  ‘Well, look who it is, my pal Bugeye.’

  ‘Man, why do you drink so much?’

  ‘Fuck you, man. I found a bottle of whiskey at work, and had a few drinks. So what.’

  He pulled something wrapped in a black plastic bag out of the pocket of his coveralls, and held it aloft.

  ‘And here’s another bottle of soju.’

  Bugeye helped Mole stagger down the other side of the hill, and headed for the hideout. They lit a ca
ndle and sat down across from each other with the blanket and sleeping bag on their laps. Mole cracked open the bottle of soju with his teeth and started to gulp it down; Bugeye had to pry the bottle away from him. Mole’s lips curled, and he burst into tears.

  ‘My hyung, they cut off both his legs. He’ll never walk again. And all our old man can talk about is getting compensated.’

  ‘You’ve had enough to drink. I’ll have the rest.’

  Bugeye remembered how well he’d slept after his first taste of alcohol a few days earlier, so he thought he could handle soju just fine. Plus, the feeling of sudden adulthood that came with getting drunk wasn’t bad either. But unlike before, he’d had nothing to eat, and the cold soju made the inside of his stomach tingle. After a few more swallows, his face and body grew hot, and the soju began to taste sweet. They sat together for an hour, Mole insisting that he was going to drink more, and Bugeye insisting that he better not.

  Mole stopped sniffling and took something that looked like a tube of toothpaste out of his pocket. He squirted the contents into a plastic bag, held it open, and brought it up to his face. Bugeye knew all too well what he was doing, but he didn’t bother to stop him. He’d tried it once himself back in his old neighbourhood. All of the kids, from the older boys to the boys his age to the little guys, had sat in a circle in an abandoned house slated for demolition, and took sniffs of the glue inside before passing the bag to the next kid. Some threw up; some writhed around, unable to catch their breath; some went limp, like they were dead, only to suddenly stagger to their feet and totter around. Mole took several deep breaths and fell over on his back. After a while, he got up, unsteady on his feet.

  ‘Heh, your face is all stretched out.’ He pointed at Bugeye and laughed.

  Bugeye slipped the plastic bag Mole had dropped into his pocket. Mole flapped his arms and pretended to fly.

  ‘I’m soaring, man. Totally soaring.’

  Mole caught his knee on the low table and fell over, snuffing out the candle as he went. When Bugeye sat him back up, he started groping around on the floor.