Fox Girl (12 page)

I tried to catch her eye, waving at her face, but she ignored me. In the darkened window behind her, I saw my own flapping hand, a ghost straining to touch her through the glass. I ducked, trying instead to see Sookie's reflection. All I could see was the small cloud her breath made on the glass and above that my own face, pale and bodyless, hanging in the window like the moon in an uncertain sky.

“I don't know,” I told Sookie as I blocked the doorway of my father's shop. I avoided her eyes, looking over my shoulder to make sure that my mother was not lurking behind me.

“Just ask,” Sookie whined. Tired and dirty, her cheeks hollowed with hunger, Sookie crowded me on the top step. She tried to edge into the store. “My mother said your father said he would help me.”

I stepped forward until Sookie dropped to the lower step. “When would my father have talked to your mother?”

Sookie scowled, jutting her lip. “He did.”

“I don't know . . .” I said, twisting the shirttail of my school uniform.

“Hyun Jin!” Sookie pointed her finger at me.

I jumped, feeling as if I had been called out in class. “Yes,” I said.

“I waited for you this morning,” she accused. “And you never came for me. Again. How many times does this make?”

“I didn't want to be late for school,” I lied.

Sookie narrowed her eyes. “You're not going to ask if I can stay even one night, are you?” she said.

I whirled around, stumbled into the sale table and scooped up some day-old rice cake. Holding the treat in my hand, I turned to Sookie. “Here,” I stammered. “Something to eat.”

Sookie stared disdainfully at the sticky rice cupped in my palm. “I told you I won't take scraps from you anymore,” she said.

I let my arm drop. “Well, then . . .”

Her lip curled. “Yeah. Well, then.” She turned and dragged herself down the steps.

I rushed after her. “Sookie!”

When she didn't slow, I hesitated, then hurried forward. “What're you going to do?” I panted at her back.

Sookie lengthened her stride. “Lobetto,” she said, tossing the words over her shoulder. “He's been wanting to set me up.”

“Oh,” I said. “That's good.” Pausing to watch her march away from me, I opened my fist and let the cakes drop into the dirt. One, softened from the heat and wet of my palm, clung to my fingers so that I had to wave and shake my hand like a crazy woman to get free.

I stopped walking Sookie to school, and Sookie stopped coming, but I never could stop myself from looking for her during the day. Over the next few months, whenever I took attendance, whenever I called out test questions, I was continually surprised by her empty desk, which remained vacant throughout the academic year. Nobody offered to fill the seat next to me.

When the other children rushed away after class, swarming into the streets to play together, I started staying late to assist the teacher in closing up the room, cementing my position as class leader. “A leader must always work harder than everyone else,” Respected Teacher said approvingly one afternoon. “But today you can take a break. I don't need you.”

Without Sookie, my days seemed too long, too lonely. I resisted his pushing me out the door. “I can wipe down the desks,” I offered. “Or sweep the floor. What about—”

“No,” said the teacher, not so kindly anymore. “Go home.” He collected his papers, dusted off his hat, then stared at me until I followed him out.

Not seeing my father in the shop when I pushed open the door, I almost called out to him before I heard voices in the backroom. My father was saying, “No, no, no,” almost begging. “I can't ask her to do it.”

“You owe me.” The words sounded like my mother's, but the voice sounded funny.

“I don't owe you anything anymore,” my father said. “We're even.”

“You made a promise to always help me,” the woman insisted. “Just as I promised to always help you. We couldn't have survived the journey south without each other.”

Inching quietly toward the backroom, I peeked behind the beaded curtain, trying to catch a glimpse of the face that owned that voice.

I saw the back of my father's head. “We were children then,” my father was saying. “Paekdu Mountain was a long time ago.” His head shook. “I don't want my daughter involved.”

I saw the woman's hands reach for my father. “Do you think I want Sookie—the only child I kept—involved?”

Gasping when I heard Sookie's name, realizing who the speaker must be, I rushed through the curtain to confront Duk Hee. “What are you doing here?” Surprise made me rude, but my father didn't reprimand me.

“Hyun Jin!” Duk Hee fell to her knees in front of me. “Sookie will listen to you. Tell her to return to school. Tell her to come home to me.”

I gaped at her bowed head, unsure of how to talk to her. “She's, uh, not at home?”

Duk Hee grabbed my hands, her nails digging into my wrists. “She's—”

My father pulled Duk Hee up and away from me. “Go home,” he said.

“But—” Duk Hee reached for me again, but my father propelled her through the curtain and out the door of the shop.

I ran after them. “Duk Hee, is Sookie okay? Does she miss me?”

“Hyun Jin!” my father barked. “Get in the house. Now!” I stumbled at the harshness in my father's voice, looked from him to Duk Hee.

“Go to her,” Duk Hee called out as my father pushed her away. “Please. She needs you, Hyun Jin. She won't tell you, but she needs you.”

When Duk Hee hurried away, my father glared at me. “In the house,” he repeated, and marched me up the steps.

What Lobetto told me, when I asked for his help in finding Sookie, was this: that it was Sookie who wanted to get into the clubs. “She begged me to help her get a job there,” he said. “She said she knew how to work it.”

I pursed my lips together. “Hmmm,” I said, raising my eyebrows. We were sitting in his kitchen, sipping the barley tea his mother had boiled for us. Lobetto's mother, temporarily between men, hovered in the background, waiting to serve her son. Smoke from her cigarette wafted about her, ghostly arms swirling around her earthy bulk.

“You don't believe me?” Lobetto gasped in mock horror, then grinned when he saw my lips twitch. “I promise you, she did. I saw her waltz right into Club Foxa like she was hot shit.” Jumping up from the chair, he thrust out his chest and minced on his toes. “‘Oooh, you big GI Joe,' ” Lobetto chirped in an English falsetto. He kissed the air. “ ‘You like cocksuckie, buttfuckie? Yum yum.' ”

“Phah!” I said, blowing air at his face. “I don't believe you. You never heard her say that.”

“Course I did,” he laughed. “Who do you think taught her those words? She was pathetic when she came to me! I'm the one who taught her to walk, talk, use her body, use her mouth.” Lobetto slouched back in the chair, and thumped his chest. “I should go into management, I think.”

I snorted. “Where is she?”

Leaning forward, he slurped at his tea. “Eh, Mama,” he said. Lobetto's mother jumped forward with a nod. “This tea is cold.”

“Don't drink it,” his mother fussed. “Cold tea is bad for the digestion.” She bustled to the stove for the teapot and poured him a fresh cup. She looked at my empty cup, and walked out.

I clenched my teeth at her rudeness, then repeated, “Where is she?”

“Who?”

Lobetto irritated me. He often could not follow a story, even when he was the storyteller. Impatient, I rapped my knuckles against his arm. “Sookie,” I said.

“That Sookie.” Lobetto spat. “Now she thinks she's too good for me. I'm the one who got her started and she walks right past me without looking, like she's better than me.”

“Lobetto,” I joked, “everybody's better than you.”

In the other room, I heard his mother slam what sounded like the blocks of wood they used as pillows against the wall.

Lobetto looked into his teacup. “I know you think that,” he said. “Everyone thinks that. Remember when we were little and I was the one who could buy candy? I could buy anything I wanted from your daddy—the whole store if I wanted to. Remember when my daddy was in Korea?”

I waved my fingers in the air, wanting him to tell me what I needed to know about Sookie. “Yeah, yeah, you were the big shot then, GI baby.”

“But you still thought you were better than me, didn't you? Because I'm half-black.” He spoke the words coolly, as if they didn't matter, but when he took a sip of tea, he grimaced as if the tea soured his stomach.

“Not true.” I shook my head. “Everyone was jealous 'cause you were half-American. We thought you would be the one to go to America.”

“I will go.” Lobetto reached into his pants pocket for his wallet and pulled out a letter written on thin blue paper. “Did I ever show you this?”

“Yes,” I sighed, trying not to roll my eyes. Lobetto had shown everyone that letter from his father several times since he had first received it just over five years ago.

A group of us had gathered around him that day on the dusty play yard, deserted for the summer. He passed out the Juicy Fruit bought with the money his father had enclosed. Sookie and Chung Woo and Young Sik shoved their pieces of gum whole into their mouths. They chomped noisily, tongues and teeth working the sugary rubber until spittle shot from their lips. I nibbled my gum stick, savoring the sugar in little sips as I chewed. We sat in a semicircle around Lobetto, all of us smacking and cracking until he raised his hand and ordered, “Shh,” so he could read this letter from his father:

“‘Dear Bobby,' ” Lobetto read.

“Bab-bi? Bab-bi!”
We screamed as we tried to snatch the letter from his hands. “Why does he call you little rice ball?”

Sookie leaned forward and rubbed the top of his bristly head. “Hmm, that is the shape of his head.”

Lobetto shook her hand from his head, and—eyes focused on the thin paper, his fingers underlining the words—he struggled to translate what he read.

“ ‘Bobby, I've been trying to find a place for you. My . . . fantasy, illusion, um . . . dream is that there will be a place for us in America. Dr. King—' ”

“Who is Dr. King?” Chung Woo interrupted.

“Must be talking about the leader of America,” Sookie said. “That's what
king
means in English.”

I shook my head. “America doesn't have a king,” I announced. “Their leader is called president. President Kennedy, for those of you who obviously did not memorize our map of the world assignment.”

Young Sik sneered at me. “You think you know everything!”

“Maybe Lobetto meant to say
president
instead of
king
,” Sookie offered.

“Shut up, you guys!” Lobetto snarled. “I am reading my father's letter, and it says King, whoever he is, says we are—shit, now here's a word I don't know, but I think it means . . . leftovers. Or maybe outcasts. Yeah, my father says we're outcasts in our own land.”

“Shit,” Chung Woo said, looking from Lobetto to Sookie. “He's talking about us. He's talking about America Town.”

Lobetto frowned at the paper in his hand. “I don't know,” he said. “My father says that the King was talking to all the Negroes in America, that there were so many
gomshis
in the street listening to him that it was like a living river. ‘A river of humanity, ' is what he calls it.”

“Dirty river,” Young Sik said under his breath. Chung Woo snickered.

“Which river, do you think?” I interjected. If the street there was as wide as the Ojum—what Sookie and I named the small trickle that ran down the hills behind her apartment like piss when it rained—then that wouldn't be very impressive for an American street. But, on the other hand, I could not imagine a street as wide as the Han river—it would be like living on an island.

“You are so stupid,” Young Sik scolded me. “His dad is just talking pretend, like a story.”

“My father is not telling a story!” Lobetto growled.

Young Sik narrowed his eyes and cracked his gum loudly. “Is, too.”

“Is not.” Lobetto held out his palm. “Give me back my gum then, if you think my father is a liar.”

Young Sik closed his mouth, lips protecting his prize, and leaned back. “I never said he was a liar. I said telling a story—”

“Same thing, stupid,” I said to him as Chung Woo whacked him on the head.

Young Sik pushed Chung Woo off before they could fall into a wrestling match, then he glared at me as he persisted in his explanation. “How could America have so many
gomshis?
I thought they sent them all here.”