Bugeye took a closer look. It was Hard Hat. He called back, ‘Have you seen my little brother?’
‘All the kids left the island already. Where’s your mum?’
‘At Peddler Grandpa’s house.’
Hard Hat gave Bugeye a firm shove on the back to send him on his way.
‘You guys should be safe there, since it’s out of the way. Pretty much everyone else evacuated across the stream.’
Bugeye returned to Scrawny’s house, figuring that Baldspot must have followed the crowd to the village. Despite still feeling jittery, Bugeye and his mother fell asleep in the spare room. Sometime in the middle of the night, Bugeye awoke. The dogs inside the house and the dogs outside in the greenhouse were barking. The windows were bright, as if a light had been turned on outside. Bugeye heard the front door bang open, and sensed someone running out of the house. When he went to look, the front door was wide open, and Scrawny was out in the front yard, yapping, while the other disabled dogs were on the porch and barking along with her. A dark-red light filled the sky. Bugeye’s mother rushed out of the room, followed by Peddler Grandpa, who turned on the light and looked around, his eyes still bleary with sleep.
‘That damn girl ran off again …’ he muttered.
He stuffed his feet into his shoes and ran out, Bugeye right on his tail. As soon as they hit the front yard, they saw why the dogs were barking so ferociously. The fire seemed to be moving up the bend in the stream. All at once, the thick silver grass went up in flames. The fire had made its way to them while they were asleep. Peddler Grandpa picked up Scrawny and put her on the porch and told Bugeye’s mother, ‘Stay in the house and shut the door.’
He ran towards the river. Bugeye followed. When they passed the pile of dismantled electronics, the flames were already getting close. Just ahead was a patch of silver grass taller than their heads; the entire field was covered in grass and weeds that’d had the entire winter to dry out. Peddler Grandpa dove into the tall grass.
‘Stay there!’ he yelled back at Bugeye.
He took off his shirt, wrapped it around his head, and disappeared into the woods near the river. Bugeye watched fearfully as the swiftly spreading flames came closer, walking backwards to keep his distance from them. After a moment, Peddler Grandpa emerged from the cloud of smoke billowing from the now-burning silver grass. He was carrying Scrawny’s mama on his back. Her body was limp. He staggered back to the house and collapsed with her in the front yard.
‘Wake up, child,’ he said, gently patting her cheek. He turned to Bugeye. ‘Go get some water.’
When Bugeye came back with a bowl of water, Scrawny’s mama was on her feet, and Grandpa had his arms around her waist, trying to stop her from running off again. She flailed her arms and yelled.
‘You bastards! You think you’re the only ones who live here? Every last one of you bastards could disappear, and the world would still be here!’
‘Okay, child. Okay. It’s all my fault.’
Peddler Grandpa pressed her back down to a sitting position. He was exhausted and gasping for air. Bugeye tried to help by wrapping his arms around Scrawny’s mama’s waist. She tried to shake off their hands, and started yelling again.
‘You think you’re the only ones who live in this world?!’
The dogs, in both the house and the greenhouse, all barked in chorus at the sound of her voice. She tried a few more times to shake off Bugeye and Peddler Grandpa, but her spent body went limp again.
Flower Island burned for the next five days. The flames refused to die down, and the smoke and the fumes were carried on the wind over to the western end of the city that had sent all of its trash there in the first place, and further still, into the heart of the city. The river that cut through the middle of the city served as a conduit for the smoke, which quickly spread across the entire city. Hospitals and residential neighbourhoods were in an uproar to evacuate. Employees in the city’s office buildings complained of headaches. As the fire spread, ten more fire trucks were sent to the island the next day, but there was so much ground to cover and so many chemicals that spraying water did little to extinguish it. It wasn’t until the fourth day that the trash pickers, who’d gotten themselves sorted out, joined forces with sanitation workers from each district to put out the fire by loading up cultivators with fill dirt to spread onto the flames and by bringing in bulldozers to turn over the smouldering trash.
Baldspot’s body was discovered two days later when the flames and the smoke had subsided. In the process of clearing the fire damage and the remaining embers from the shantytown, the trash pickers found a dozen or more bodies—grown-ups and children alike. Baldspot had fallen with his blanket over his head and both feet poking out from beneath the scorched hem. Bugeye ran over to check, but the little guy’s body was unburned. It looked like he’d been asphyxiated by the smoke. Bugeye watched as his mother, for the first time in years, wept openly, and loudly, in front of other people. There were other bodies, as well, already halfway reduced to ash. The surviving families were poor, and so they took the management office’s advice and had the bodies of their loved ones cremated; the family members who returned with handfuls of ash went down to the river or out to the fields to scatter the remains. Bugeye picked up Baldspot’s torn and restitched black baseball cap—the same old beat-up cap that Baldspot had refused to throw away and insisted on wearing everywhere he went, even after Bugeye bought him a brand-new sky-blue one.
Trash came out of each of the city’s districts every day, but the trash pickers had lost their homes, and having lost all of the recyclables that they’d collected, they had no means of building new shacks. There were also many burn victims, and though the rest of the survivors looked okay on the outside, at least half of the pickers were suffering from the after effects. No one had been able to save anything from the fire; though, with time, they would be able to fish out other useful items from the trash and refurnish their lives once more.
Bugeye’s mother said nothing, but he knew that the money they’d buried beneath the linoleum had burned up. The heat was so great that all of the Styrofoam and vinyl had melted together into one dark lump. And yet the garbage trucks kept marching in, day after day. Dozens upon dozens of temporary tents were pitched, and work resumed. Bugeye’s mother took medication twice a day now and endured, while the rest of the trash pickers offered each other pills for their headaches.
Bugeye finished his afternoon shift, climbed the black ash-covered hill, and headed alone towards the hideout. All that was left in the ruins of the fire were the scorched cinder-block walls. The roof had burned and caved in, and the magazines and plastic toys and the table and the sleeping bag that they’d stashed inside had all blackened and melted into distorted shapes. Bugeye walked through the field where the shrubs and silver grass had been reduced to stumps and ash, and headed west towards Scrawny’s house. Peddler Grandpa came out to the yard and watched as Bugeye made his way over.
‘I heard about the kid. Poor thing …’ Peddler Grandpa said, patting Bugeye on the arm. Bugeye suppressed the pain in his throat and looked away. They stood there in silence for a moment.
‘They say the city’s planning to build some prefab homes for all of you.’
Bugeye looked over at Scrawny’s house.
‘I like it here,’ he said.
‘We’ve got the extra room. You two could move in.’
Bugeye peeked through the window and asked, ‘Where’s Scrawny’s mama?’
Peddler Grandpa looked down at the ground.
‘Probably asleep in her room,’ he muttered. ‘She hasn’t eaten in days. Only drinks water. I’m afraid it might be time to send her to the hospital.’
Peddler Grandpa reached out and gave Bugeye’s hand a squeeze.
‘Guess those items you gave me will come in handy now,’ he added.
They heard someone humming a slow melody,
and when they turned to look, Scrawny’s mama had come out of the house. They couldn’t tell if it was the folk song ‘Arirang’ or that old ballad from the 1930s, ‘Tears of Mokpo,’ but when they listened closer, they realised she was talking to the tune of a song.
What to do, what to do? Can’t live, can’t die.
What to do, my poor babies? Can’t stay, can’t go.
She bobbed and swayed across the yard, her feet never seeming to touch the ground. Peddler Grandpa stuck a cigarette in his mouth and stood off to one side and watched, as if there were no point anymore in trying to stop her. Bugeye did what he’d once seen Baldspot do, and trailed politely after her. When Scrawny’s mama turned and headed towards the bend in the stream, Peddler Grandpa walked over to Bugeye and stayed him by the arm.
‘Don’t go. You might run into trouble.’
‘It’s okay. I’ll be fine.’
Bugeye walked slowly behind Scrawny’s mama, whose limbs were limp and swaying like laundry hanging from a line. They walked through the ankle-deep ash where the silver grass had burned. When they got to the yard in front of the now-empty shrine, the pillars were all scorched, the roof was even uglier and more crooked than before, and nearly half of the tiles had fallen off and were lying in shards on the ground. The old willow tree that had stood in a once-lush stand of silver grass was burned black from roots to branches. Scrawny’s mama ran her hands down the trunk and mumbled:
What to do, what to do? Can’t live, can’t die.
What to do, my poor babies? Can’t stay, can’t go.
She knelt down and swept her hands over the dirt at the base of the tree. The ash from the burnt grass billowed up and turned her hands and skirt black. She ran her hands down her face, turning her skin black. Then she looked around and walked over to the front of the yard where scorched branches stuck out of the ground. Bugeye followed her. The dense silver grass had all burned, leaving only black ash and a wide-open space. At the centre was a basin carved from stone that had once been fed by a spring; the water had long since dried up, and only little piles of sand and chipped stone remained.
Scrawny’s mama stood in front of it, staring down at something. Bugeye went over to her and looked inside. There were items in the basin, all in a neat row, as if someone had placed them there. With a sudden burst of energy, Scrawny’s mama stepped into the dry spring, picked up the items, and started chucking them at Bugeye’s feet. A cracked wooden pestle. A cornstalk broom with the tips worn down. Two rubber shoes missing their heels, one belonging to a man and the other to a woman. A tarnished silver hairpin. Half of a water buffalo horn button from a traditional men’s overcoat. A broken pipe. A bamboo comb missing its teeth. A frayed cloth thimble. A sleek axe handle carved from oak. A wooden spool with the lacquer flaking off. A half-burnt poker. A chipped rice scoop. A tiny wooden top. Some had been merely scorched, some half burned away, and some entirely untouched by the flames. Scrawny’s mama stepped out of the spring and raked the items together without a word, and then picked up as much as she could carry and walked back to the shrine, while Bugeye, who had no idea what she was up to, picked up what he could carry and followed her. There were so many things that Bugeye had to make a second trip for the rest. Scrawny’s mama peered under the raised floor of the shrine, which was scorched but otherwise intact.
‘Stay with us,’ she said. ‘Don’t go. Don’t leave us.’
Scrawny’s mama shoved each of the items they’d carried as far under the shrine as she could; Bugeye piled the items together, and handed them to her one by one. She carefully placed them side by side so they wouldn’t overlap. The way she moved her hands made it look like she was laying each item down to rest and tucking it into bed.
While Scrawny’s mama was absorbed in her task, Bugeye blurted out, ‘Why are you treating these useless things like they’re some kind of treasure?’
‘Because they loved their owners, and their owners loved them.’
‘Then what about the stuff way over there in the landfill?’
Scrawny’s mama turned her dirtied, soot-covered face to look at Bugeye and said coldly, ‘That stuff was unloved!’
By the time she was finished, her and Bugeye’s hands were completely black with soot. Bugeye felt somehow like he’d just helped a neighbour whom he’d known a long time to move houses. He made up his mind to come back the very next day and place Baldspot’s old baseball cap under the shrine as well. After all, the hat that had lost its master must be missing Baldspot, too.
*
Spring came on the wind. The construction of fifty blocks of pre-fabricated buildings was completed in forty days; each block contained twenty-five rooms roughly sixteen square metres in size. Portable public showers also appeared. Bugeye’s father, who had been taken away long ago to be schooled on following the straight and narrow, never came back, and a letter arrived from Baron Ashura, who said he was working on the prison sanitation crew. After the shantytown burned down, Scrawny mama’s symptoms worsened. She started alarming others not only in the landfill but also in town, and after the management office called in a report, she was taken to a hospital from which she did not re-emerge for the rest of the year. Was it actually possible, Bugeye wondered, for all of those who had left, to return as shiny new people, as if they’d only been taken somewhere to get sprayed down and disinfected? His mother’s sole remaining wish was to send Bugeye to school, but he had no intention of finding himself locked up inside a school or prison or hospital or anything of that sort.
After Scrawny’s mama left, Bugeye’s life grew busier than before. Every day after work, he would gather up any special food that he’d found in the trash, and take it over to Scrawny’s house. Peddler Grandpa, who was now living on his own, collected leftover food as well, but at some point the dogs had begun waiting for Bugeye’s deliveries instead. Even before he arrived, the members of Scrawny’s household knew he was coming, and were already panting and whining. They would all come running the moment he stepped inside, and clamour to be picked up.
One day, after dishing the food out equally to the pups as he always did, Bugeye headed out across the field and over the hill to the hideout. The frequent spring rains had turned the marks left over from the fire a slick black, and the ground was muddy. He sat down in front of the hideout and watched the sun set across the river. It was slowly growing darker when a kind of dark shadow came and sat down quietly next to him. Bugeye turned to look, and there, dressed in grown-up coveralls with the sleeves rolled up and that torn baseball cap perched on his head at an angle, was Baldspot, sitting beside him and gazing out at the same place. Bugeye started to speak, but the boy pointed and whispered, ‘There.’
Bugeye saw several blue points of light moving in the darkness down where the river met the foot of the hill. He held his breath as he watched the lights pause and bob and glide along as if dancing. When Bugeye looked back at Baldspot, Baldspot was standing several feet away. Then, like a soap bubble bursting, the shadowy form vanished and became a single blue speck of light that floated down to the bank of the river. For some reason, Bugeye felt like he should apologise, as if he’d done something wrong and shouldn’t show his face around those parts again. But then it hit him.
‘Oh, thank goodness,’ he murmured.
All of this, from the outskirts of the city to the heart of downtown, the countless houses and buildings and automobiles and highways and railroad bridges and street lights and the ear-splitting racket and the vomit on the streets left by drunks and the trash heaps and the discarded things and the dust and the smoke and the rotten smells and every toxic thing, all of these terrible things, were made by the living, by the people of this world. But, with time, the flower stalks would bore their way through the ash of the charred fields and stretch and sway in the wind, tender new leaves would unfurl on the scorched branches, the dark-green blades of young silver grass would slide up from the earth. They would c
ome back. They always had.
Familiar Things Page 16
