The Orphan Master's Son

by Adam Johnson

  “Was the Senator an astronaut?” he asked her.

  “He trained as one,” the Senator’s wife said. “But he never got the call.”

  “Do you know the satellite?” he asked. “The one that orbits with people from many nations aboard?”

  “The Space Station?” Wanda asked.

  “Yes,” Jun Do said. “That must be it. Tell me, is it built for peace and brotherhood?”

  The ladies looked at each other. “Yes,” the Senator’s wife said. “I suppose it is.”

  The Senator’s wife rummaged through kitchen drawers until she found a few doctors’ samples of antibiotics. She slipped two foil packets into his shirt pocket. “For later, if you get sick,” she said. “Take them if you have a fever. Can you tell the difference between a bacterial and a viral infection?”

  He nodded.

  “No,” Wanda said to the Senator’s wife. “I don’t think he can.”

  The Senator’s wife said, “If you have a fever and are bringing up green or brown mucus, then take three of these a day until they’re gone.” She popped the first capsule out of the foil and handed it to him. “We’ll start a cycle now, just in case.”

  Wanda poured him a glass of water, but after he’d popped the pill in his mouth and chewed it up, he said, “No thanks, I’m not thirsty.”

  “Bless your heart,” the Senator’s wife said.

  Pilar opened the cooler. “Ay,” she said and quickly closed it. “What I’m supposed to do with this? Tonight is Tex-Mex.”

  “My word,” the Senator’s wife said, shaking her head. “Tiger.”

  “I don’t know,” Wanda said. “I kind of want to try it.”

  “Did you smell it?” Pilar asked.

  “Wanda,” the Senator’s wife said. “We could all go to hell for what’s in that cooler.”

  Jun Do jumped off the counter. With one hand, he began tucking in his shirt.

  “If my wife were here,” he said, “she’d tell me to throw it out and replace it with flank steak. She’d say you can’t taste the difference, anyway, and now everyone eats, and no one loses face. At dinner, I’d talk about how great it was, how it was the best meat I’d ever had, and that would make her smile.”

  Pilar looked to the Senator’s wife. “Tiger tacos?”

  The Senator’s wife tried the words in her mouth. “Tiger tacos.”

  “Pak Jun Do, what’s called for now is rest,” the Senator’s wife said. “I’m going to show you to your room,” she added with a quiet fierceness, as if she were transgressing somehow by being alone with him. The house had many hallways, lined with more family photos, these framed in wood and metal. The door to the room where he would sleep was slightly open, and when they swung it wide, a dog leaped off the bed. The Senator’s wife didn’t seem concerned. The bed was covered with a quilt, and by pulling it taut, she removed the dog’s impression.

  “My grandmother was quite the quilter,” she said, then looked into Jun Do’s eyes. “That’s where you make a blanket out of scraps from your life. It doesn’t take money, and the blanket tells a story.” Then she showed Jun Do how to read the quilt. “There was a mill in Odessa that printed panels of Bible stories on its flour sacks. The panels were like church windows—they let people see the story. This piece of lace is from the window of the house Grandmother left when she was married at fifteen. This panel is Exodus and here is Christ Wandering, both from flour sacks. The black velvet is from the hem of her mother’s funeral dress. She died not long after my grandmother came to Texas, and the family sent her this black swatch. This starts a sad time in her life—a patch of baby blanket from a lost child, a swatch of a graduation gown she purchased but never got to wear, the faded cotton of her husband’s uniform. But look here, see the colors and fabrics of a new wedding, of children and prosperity? And of course the last panel is the Garden. Much loss and uncertainty she had to endure before she could sew that ending to her own story. If I could have reached your wife Sun Moon, that’s what I would have spoken to her about.”

  On the bedside table was a Bible. She brought it to him. “Wanda’s right—you’re not an a-hole husband,” she said. “I can tell you care about your wife. I’m just a woman she never met on the other side of the world, but could you give her this for me? These words always bring me solace. Scripture will always be there, no matter what doors are closed to her.”

  Jun Do held the book, felt its soft cover.

  “I could read some with you,” she said. “Do you know of Christ?”

  Jun Do nodded. “I’ve been briefed on him.”

  A pain came to the corners of her eyes, then she nodded in acceptance.

  He handed back the book. “I’m sorry,” Jun Do told her. “This book is forbidden where I come from. Possessing it comes with a high penalty.”

  “You don’t know how it sorrows me to hear that,” she said, then went to the door, where a white guayabera hung. “Hot water on that arm, you hear? And wear this shirt tonight.”

  When she left, the dog leaped back onto the bed.

  He pulled off his dress shirt and looked around the guest room. It was filled with memorabilia of the Senator—photos of him with proud people, plaques of gold and bronze. There was a small writing desk, and here a phone rested atop a white book. Jun Do lifted the phone’s receiver, listened to its solid tone. He took up the book underneath it, leafed through its pages. Inside were thousands of names. It took him a while to understand that everyone in central Texas was listed here, with their full names and addresses. He couldn’t believe that you could look up anyone and seek them out, that all you had to do to prove you weren’t an orphan was to open a book and point to your parents. It was unfathomable that a permanent link existed to mothers and fathers and lost mates, that they were forever fixed in type. He flipped through the pages. Donaldson, Jimenez, Smith—all it took was a book, a little book could save you a lifetime of uncertainty and guesswork. Suddenly he hated his small, backward homeland, a land of mysteries and ghosts and mistaken identities. He tore a page from the back of the book and wrote across the top: Alive and Well in North Korea. Below this he wrote the names of all the people he’d helped kidnap. Next to Mayumi Nota, the girl from the pier, he placed a star of exception.

  In the bathroom, there was a basket filled with new razors and miniature tubes of toothpaste and individually wrapped soaps. He didn’t touch them. Instead, he stared in the mirror, seeing himself the way the Senator’s wife had seen him. He touched his lacerations, his broken clavicle, the burn marks, the eleventh rib. Then he touched the face of Sun Moon, the beautiful woman in this halo of wounds.

  He went to the toilet and stared into its mouth. It came in a moment, the meat, three heaves of it, and then he was empty. His skin had gone tight, and he felt weak.

  In the shower, he made the water hot. He stood there, steeping his wound in the spray, like fire on his arm. When he closed his eyes, it was like being nursed by the Second Mate’s wife again, back when his eyes were still swollen shut and she was just the smell of a woman, the sounds a woman made, and he had a fever and he didn’t know where he was and he had to imagine the face of the woman who would save him.

  Toward twilight, Jun Do dressed in his white guayabera shirt, with its stiff collar and fancy stitching. Through the window, he could see Dr. Song and the Minister exit a shiny black mobile home where they had been holding talks with the Senator all afternoon. The dog stood and came to the edge of the bed. There was a harness around its neck. It was kind of a sad thing, a dog without a warren. A band started playing somewhere, perhaps Spanish voices. When Jun Do turned to go out into the night, the dog followed.

  The hallway was lined with photographs of the Senator’s family, always smiling. To move toward the kitchen was like going back in time, the graduation photos becoming sports photos, and then there were scouting clubs, pigtails, birthday parties, and finally the pictures were of babies. Was this what a family was, how it grew—straight as the children’s teeth? S
ure, there was an arm in a sling and over time the grandparents disappeared from the photos. The occasions changed, as did the dogs. But this was a family, start to finish, without wars or famines or political prisons, without a stranger coming to town to drown your daughter.

  Outside, the air was dry and cool and smelled of cactus ribs and aluminum stock tanks. The stars wavered as Texas gave off the last of its heat. Jun Do followed the sounds of Mexican singers and a whirring blender to the corral, where the men wore white shirts and the women were wrapped in colorful shawls. There was a tripod of fire, illuminating the sheen of people’s faces. It was a thrilling idea—setting wood ablaze just so people could mingle and enjoy one another’s company in the dark. By the flickering light, the Senator played his fiddle and sang a song called “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”

  Wanda walked by holding so many limes she had to press them against her chest. When Jun Do stopped, the dog stopped, its coat in the firelight orange and black. “Okay, dog,” Jun Do said, and stiffly patted its head like an American would.

  Wanda juiced limes with a wooden baton as Pilar upturned bottles of liquor into the blender. Wanda jazzed its button in time with the music, then Pilar filled a line of yellow plastic cups with great flair. Wanda brought him a drink when she saw him.

  He stared at the salt on the rim. “What’s this?” he asked.

  “Go ahead,” she said. “Be a sport. You know what Saddam had in the deepest room of his bunker? I’m talking below the hardened war rooms and command centers. He had an Xbox video game, with only one controller.”

  He gave her a look of incomprehension.

  “Everybody needs to have fun,” she said.

  Jun Do drank from the cup—tart and dry, it tasted like thirst itself.

  “I looked into your friend,” Wanda said. “The Japanese and South Koreans don’t have anybody who fits the bill. If he crossed the Yalu into China, then who knows. And maybe he’s not going by his real name. Give it time, he might turn up. Sometimes they make their way to Thailand.”

  Jun Do unfolded his piece of paper and handed it to Wanda. “Can you pass along this message for me?”

  “ ‘Alive and Well in North Korea,’ ” she read. “What is this?”

  “It’s a list of Japanese kidnap victims.”

  “Those kidnappings all made the news,” Wanda said. “Anyone could have made this list. It doesn’t prove anything.”

  “Prove?” Jun Do asked. “I’m not trying to prove anything. I’m trying to tell you what no one else can—that none of these people were lost, that they all survived their kidnappings and that they are alive and well. Not knowing, that’s the worst. That list isn’t for you—it’s a message from me to those families, for their peace of mind. It’s all I have to give them.”

  “They’re all alive and well,” she said. “Except for the one with the star?”

  Jun Do made himself speak her name. “Mayumi,” he said.

  She sipped her drink and looked at him sideways. “Do you speak Japanese?”

  “Enough,” he said. “Watashi no neko ga maigo ni narimashita?”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Can you help me find my kitty-cat?”

  Wanda gave him a look, then slid the paper into her back pocket.

  It wasn’t until dinner that Jun Do got a good look at Dr. Song. Jun Do tried to guess how the talks had gone by the way Dr. Song poured margaritas for the ladies and nodded in approval at the spiciness of the salsa. The table was round and seated eight, with Pilar swooping in to add and remove dishes. She named everything on the lazy Susan at the center of the table, including flautas, mole, rellenos, and fix-it-yourself tacos: there was a tortilla warmer and dishes of cilantro, onion, diced tomatoes, shredded cabbage, Mexican cream, black beans, and tiger.

  When Dr. Song tasted his tiger, a look of pure glee crossed his face. “Tell me this isn’t the best tiger you’ve had,” he said. “Tell me American tiger can measure up. Is the Korean tiger not fresher, more vital?”

  Pilar brought another platter of meat. “Bueno,” she said. “Too bad there is no Mexican tiger.”

  “You’ve outdone yourself, Pilar,” the Senator’s wife said. “Your best Tex-Mex yet.”

  Dr. Song eyed them both with suspicion.

  The Minister held up his taco. In English, he said, “Yes.”

  Tommy ate his taco and nodded in approval. “The best meat I ever had,” he said, “was with me and some buddies on leave. We raved and raved about the dinner, eating until we were stuffed. We spoke so highly they brought out the chef, who said he would make us some to go, that it was no problem because he had another dog out back.”

  “Oh, Tommy,” the Senator’s wife said.

  “I was with a tribal militia once,” Wanda said. “They prepared a feast of fetal pigs, boiled in goat’s milk. That’s the most tender meat ever.”

  “Enough,” the Senator’s wife said. “Another topic, please.”

  The Senator said, “Anything but politics.”

  “There is something I must know,” Jun Do said. “When I was upon the waters, in the Sea of Japan, we followed the broadcasts of two American girls. I never knew what became of them.”

  “The rowers,” Wanda said.

  “What an awful story,” the Senator’s wife said. “Such a waste.”

  The Senator turned to Tommy. “They found the boat, right?”

  “They found the boat but no girls,” Tommy said. “Wanda, you get any backchannel on what really went down?”

  Wanda was leaning over her plate to eat, a stream of taco juice running down her hand. “I hear the boat was partly burned,” she said with her mouth full. “They found the blood of one girl but nothing of the other. A murder-suicide, perhaps.”

  “It was the girl who rowed in the dark,” Jun Do said. “She used a flare gun.”

  The table went silent.

  “She rowed with her eyes closed,” Jun Do said. “That was her problem. That’s how she got off course.”

  Tommy asked, “Why would you ask what happened to those girls if you already knew?”

  “I didn’t know what happened,” Jun Do said. “I only knew how.”

  “Tell us what happened to you,” the Senator’s wife asked Jun Do. “You said you’ve spent some time on the water. How did you come by such a wound?”

  “It is too soon,” Dr. Song cautioned them. “The wound is still fresh. This story is as difficult to hear as it is for my friend to tell.” He turned to Jun Do. “Another time, yes.”

  “It’s okay,” Jun Do said, “I can tell it,” and he proceeded to recount their encounter with the Americans in great detail, how the Junma was boarded, the way the soldiers moved with their rifles and how they became blackened with soot. He explained the shoes that he had found, and how they littered the decks, and Jun Do described how the soldiers smoked and sorted through the shoes after the boat was declared clear, how they began stealing souvenirs, including the most sacred portraits of the Dear and Great Leaders, and how a knife was then drawn and the Americans were forced to retreat. He mentioned the fire extinguisher. He told them how officers on the American ship drank coffee and watched. He described the cruise missile that flexed its biceps on a sailor’s lighter.

  The Senator said, “But how’d you get hurt, son?”

  “They came back,” Jun Do said.

  “Why would they come back?” Tommy asked. “They’d already cleared your vessel.”

  “What were you doing on a fishing vessel in the first place?” the Senator asked.

  “Clearly,” Dr. Song said with some force, “the Americans were ashamed that a single North Korean, armed only with a knife, made cowardly an entire armed American unit.”

  Jun Do took a drink of water. “All I know,” he said, “is that it was first light, the sun to the starboard. The American ship came out of the brightness, and suddenly we were boarded. The Second Mate was on deck with the Pilot and the Captain. It was laundry day, so they were boili
ng seawater. There was screaming. I went up top with the Machinist and the First Mate. The man from before, Lieutenant Jervis, had the Second Mate at the rail. They were shouting at him about the knife.”

  “Wait a minute,” the Senator said. “How do you know this sailor’s name?”

  “Because he gave me his card,” Jun Do said. “He wanted us to know who had settled the score.” Jun Do passed the business card to Wanda, who read the name “Lieutenant Harlan Jervis.”

  Tommy stepped forward and took the card. “The Fortitude, Fifth Fleet,” he said to the Senator. “That must be one of Woody McParkland’s boats.”

  The Senator said, “Woody wouldn’t tolerate any bad apples in his outfit.”

  The Senator’s wife lifted her hand. “What happened next?” she asked.

  Jun Do said, “Then he was thrown to the sharks, and I jumped in to save him.”

  Tommy said, “But where did all the sharks come from?”

  “The Junma is a fishing boat,” Jun Do explained. “Sharks were always following us.”

  “So there was just a swirl of sharks?” Tommy asked.

  “Did the boy know what was happening to him?” the Senator asked.

  Tommy asked, “Did Lieutenant Jervis say anything?”

  “Well, there weren’t many sharks at first,” Jun Do said.

  The Senator asked, “Did this Jervis fellow throw the boy in himself, with his own hands?”

  “Or did he order one of his sailors to do it?” Tommy asked.

  The Minister placed his hands flat on the table. “Story,” he declared in English, “true.”

  “No,” the Senator’s wife said.

  Jun Do turned to her, her old-lady eyes pale and cloudy.

  “No,” she said. “I understand that during wartime, no side has a monopoly on the unspeakable. And I am not naive enough to think that the engines of the righteous aren’t powered by the fuel of injustice. But these are our finest boys, under our best command, flying the colors of this nation. So, no sir, you are wrong. No sailor of ours ever did such an act. I know this. I know this for a fact.”