Fox Girl (11 page)

“Sookie,” I said, “did I ever tell you when my mother took me to this grape farm?”

“No.” She stretched her arm out, groping for a small bunch of grapes above our heads. Most of the globes looked pink, sour, instead of purple. “This grape farm?” she challenged. “This very same one?”

I propped myself onto an elbow, squinted around. I didn't know if this was Grape Auntie's farm, but I nodded. “My mother carried me from town all the way on her back,” I said.

“Your mother did that?” Sookie sounded sleepy, but surprised.

“Yes,” I snapped. “She loved me so much, she carried me, then let me eat as many grapes as I wanted, just because I asked for them for my snack and we didn't have any at home.” I paused to see if Sookie would question me again. When she didn't, I added, “That's how much she loved me.” I scratched at a mosquito bite, scarping the skin until it oozed blood. “That was before you knew me.”

“Ummh,” Sookie grunted. “I can't remember a time I didn't know you.”

I turned on my stomach to study her expression. “Are you saying I'm lying?” I demanded.

“Why would I say that?” she asked without looking at me. She sat up to concentrate on stripping the meat off of each grape she had picked. After sucking the seeds clean, she spit them into her hand and buried them in the ground.

 

In the late afternoon, we burst through the rice onto a dirt road carved by jeep tracks. “This is the last part of it,” Lobetto told us. “The Monkey House is at the end of this road.” Then he taught us American marching songs his father had taught him. Like soldiers heading home on leave, we shouted out:
and:

 

“Eh, Lobetto,” we joked. “Do you even understand what you're singing?”

“Of course,” Lobetto said. “I'm half-American.”

“What's ‘toad,' then?” Sookie challenged.

“What's ‘fucked'?” I asked. I had heard Lobetto curse us with that word often enough to know that it was bad, but I wasn't sure how it translated.

“You don't know?” Lobetto hooted. “You don't know? Sookie, you tell her.”

Sookie's mouth thinned, like she was holding something in, but she said, “It means, Hyun Jin, ‘Your mama will die.' So don't ever say it.”

Lobetto bent over, laughing, and held his sides like he was vomiting. I hated when he did that, acting like we were big jokes. “I bet,” he gasped, “your mama wishes she was dead whenever she gets fucked.” He laughed some more, then croaked, “Do you guys want to know what ‘whore' means?”

Sookie and I pushed past him. We knew what whore meant; we knew whose mothers they were.

A jeep roared up behind us, silencing Lobetto's laughter, and we skittered to the side of the road. When it passed, we gave chase in the exhaust of fumes and dust. Without turning to look at us, the driver lifted his arm, releasing a handful of wrapped candies in the wake of the jeep. The candies landed like golden bullets in the dirt at our feet, and we laughed as we gathered them up. Unwrapping them, we sucked as we marched down the road, our mouths too full of sugar to sing again.

After a dip in the road, an abrupt hook, we came suddenly—almost unexpectedly, though that was our destination—face-to-face with the Monkey House. Gray and squat as a toad, the two-story Monkey House, ribboned by a chain-link fence, looked like any other government building. Except that this one, far outside the town, was half-hidden in the midst of nameless hills that rose around it like burial mounds.

In front of the padlocked gate, two guards pitched knives at the ground. Each time the knife quivered upright in the dirt, they would laugh. Then the thrower would step back and money changed hands. I could not tell if the soldiers were the same ones that had passed us on the road.

Lobetto pinched our elbows, then flicked his head toward the back of the building. In the shadow of the Monkey House, blocked from the guards, Sookie and I pulled and prodded each other over the fence. Lobetto, who had scaled it easily, puffed out his chest and grinned at us as our toes gripped loops of fence and our fingers slipped and slid off cold metal.

As we scrambled over the top, Lobetto scrounged on the ground for a handful of pebbles, which he threw at a window on the second floor. The rocks hit the window like a spattering of hail, then, rebounding, showered down on us.

“Ow, ow, ow,” Sookie and I whispered as we danced around, trying to avoid the pelting. Lobetto stood under the window without moving, then shook his head free of pebbles when the quick onslaught was over.

“Shhwee, Lobetto!” A woman had lifted the window and poked her perm-burned head out. “You're early.”

Lobetto swung his bag off his shoulder and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “Eh, Mousie,” he said, tossing one up. “My mother?”

“Not here.” Mousie caught the pack and motioned for Lobetto to hurry. She was small and brown with the sharp, pointed chin of a rodent. “Heard she went up to Tongae hot springs with a rich GI.”

Lobetto pitched two packs in quick succession.

“White guy this time,” Mousie said, her hands darting quickly for the cigarettes. She flung them behind her, her eyes ready for the next one.

“Bet he don't know about me,” Lobetto grunted as he threw the last of the Lucky Strikes.

“No,” giggled Mousie, “I bet he don't.” She faced the room and lifted her hand to close the window.

“Wait!” Sookie yelped.

“Shup!” said Lobetto, waving his arm to silence her.

“Ask about my mom,” she whispered.

Mousie scowled down at us. “Does your girlfriend want to join us up here? We got plenty of space in the Rose Room.”

“You know Duk Hee?” Lobetto asked.

Mousie turned to talk to the others in the room. When she looked back, she jerked her head to the side. “Try the Chrysanthemum Room. Two windows down, the one with the bars.”

 

I didn't recognize the face that came to the window, not even when Sookie cried,
“Omoni!”
The face looked pale and gaunt, drawn with harsh lines of panic.

“What are you doing here?” Sookie's mother hissed.

“Mama,” Sookie wailed. “I miss you. I'm scared. I'm hungry.”

Sookie's mother pinned me with her black eyes. “Take her to your house,” she ordered.

I opened my mouth to speak, though I wasn't sure what I would have said. In the end, I only stared up at her, gaping.

“No, Mama,” Sookie said. “I'll be okay. Just give me some money so I can wait at home for you.” Her arms reached toward the window, as if begging her mother to lift her into a hug.

“Go with Hyun Jin,” she snapped.

Sookie dropped her arms and looked at the ground. “The mother doesn't like me.”

Sookie's mother stared at her for so long, I thought she must have not heard her.

“She said my mother doesn't like her,” I repeated, as loud as I dared.

When Sookie's mother's face reddened and her lips thinned, I stammered, “I'm sorry. It's not me. It's my mother, I—”

Without looking at me, she said, “Never mind about the mother. You tell Hyun Jin's father I said for him to take you in.”

Stretching an arm through the bars, Sookie's mother held out a square of knotted silk. She dropped it, the red and blue tails of the knot fluttering like flags on the way down. Though Sookie stood under the window, ready to catch the purse, it dropped into the dirt beside her. Lobetto streaked forward, scooped up the prize and raced toward the fence.

“Hurry up,” he said.

“Lobetto!” Sookie's mother scolded, though he couldn't hear her. “Sookie,” she said, her face pressed against the bars as if she could squeeze herself out with the words, “don't let anyone steal that money from you. That's yours. That's yours. It's the only thing keeping you from this place.”

After dividing the money into thirds—Lobetto clucking his tongue at the meager hoard and saying “pitiful” while he pocketed the won—Sookie reknotted the square of silk and wrapped it around her wrist with the weight of it cupped in her palm. Our shadows lengthening behind us, we decided to spend part of the money on train tickets back home. I was anxious to avoid questions from my parents; Lobetto was anxious not to miss out on his club circuit; and we took Sookie's silence as assent.

Sookie and I pushed toward the back of the train.
“Shillye hamnida,”
we repeated over and over again as we shouldered past other passengers and stepped on toes in our quest to find a handhold.

“Over here,” said Lobetto. Tired of following behind us, ducking and weaving between bodies, he bulldozed a space near the windows. Sprawling in the foot space between two seats, Lobetto stretched his legs—stained by mud and sun and birth—into the aisle, ignoring the dirty looks of the passengers at whose feet he sat.

“Unjo.”
Lobetto pulled in his legs and motioned for us to sit next to him. “You might as well be comfortable.” Sookie and I squatted by his toes. While Sookie looked out the window toward the hills shielding the Monkey House, Lobetto pulled a packet of colored papers from his bag.

“Homework?” I asked, surprised. I had thought all the
ainokos
did was listen to stories about America and wait for their fathers to remember them.

“Work.” Lobetto handed me a yellow sheet.

As I struggled to sound out the English: “See the Club Angel! Show. Pussy Pingpongball. Pussy smokecigarettes. Pussy writeletter,” Lobetto explained. “I'm a bringer,” he said. “The clubs pay me to bring in GIs. That's for Club Angel. Pink paper is for Club Rose, blue for Club Foxa. I make good money when the GIs come in with my programs.” He tapped at his name scrawled in the upper corner of the paper.

“Pussy Openbeer bot-tle.” I continued to wrestle with the words. “And ‘dr-dr-I-ink-u'—”

Lobetto jerked the paper from my grasp. “You're pathetic,” he snarled. “If you want to have a future, you have to learn better English. I'll read it to you.” He puffed out his chest and cleared his throat, just as he used to do when preparing to read to us from his father's letters.

“See Fish Pushin sideher. Banana pushinto her. Egg pushin toher cunt—”

Before he finished reading the flyer, Sookie interrupted. “I'm hungry,” she announced.

And suddenly we all were; that's all we could think about.

At the next stop, Lobetto stood up, leaned over the people in the seats and stuck his head out the window.
“Yogi-e, yogi!”
Lobetto waved at the grandmas selling food in the station. “Here, we'll buy something here,” he called out. Women with backs bowed from food baskets crowded beneath our window, waving their specialties under the tips of Lobetto's fingers.

“What do you want?” Lobetto asked us. “
Kimbap,
sweet potato, eggs, persimmon,
hodu, cidah?
”

“Everything,” I growled, suddenly hungry.

Sookie fumbled with the knot on her money pouch.

“Hurry, hurry.” He motioned to the vendors with one hand and held his other hand out to us. We dropped money into his palm, and Lobetto passed it out the window. Reaching down, he grabbed up what was offered—rolls of
kimbap,
strings of yam, small woven baskets of eggs and orange persimmons, newspaper cups of walnuts, a six-pack of
cidah
—and hastily handed them off to us. Lobetto shoved his share into his canvas bag, while Sookie and I scooped the food into our shirts.

As the train began its slow roll out of the station, the three of us picnicked on the floor, stuffing rice balls into our mouths whole, washing down the bits of sticky grains clinging to our teeth with long gulps of bubbling
cidah.
We cracked open the eggs and nuts, devouring the meat and sweeping the shells underneath the seats. The
koguma
and persimmon we ate for dessert, smearing the fleshy fruits against our lips and tongues until the juices scented our faces and hair with their perfume.

When the passengers seated above Lobetto got off at the Pusan train station, Sookie and I scrambled into their seats. Relaxing into the cushions, we propped our feet against Lobetto's back. The sky outside deepened into the blue-gray of twilight, the time of magic and transformation. The windows turned into trick mirrors: I could see the countryside passing through my face. Sometimes a flash of light, like a lamp held by the dead returning for their annual
chesa,
winked from the fields and shattered my image.

As I tried to see my own face, I remembered how in my father's stories, reflection always reveals true nature. A fox demon disguised as a beautiful girl could be recognized by forcing it to look into a mirror, which would bare its real face.

Averting my eyes, I noticed the handkerchief from Sookie's mother hanging limply from Sookie's wrist. Digging through my pockets, I counted the money I had left: less than a hundred won. Less than a pound of rice. Ten times less than what her mother made in one night at the clubs. The picnic hardened in my stomach; I began to realize that, to Sookie, this day hadn't been just an adventure, a mere game, and I became afraid. For her, and for me.