Fox Girl (34 page)

Suspicious, I glared at her. “Is this a trap?” I said.

“What?” Sookie said. She pushed the money on me. “Just take it. Cut us both free.”

I stared at her, slowly reaching for the money. “What's in it for you?” I asked. “You never gave me anything in your life.”

Sookie snorted. “You don't think I ever gave you anything?” she said. She looked at Myu Myu and then at me.

“Myu doesn't count,” I said quickly. “Because you didn't want her in the first place.”

“I saw you come into this world, Hyun Jin,” Sookie said, “with my handprint on you.” She held her hand up, as if to touch my face, but it stilled inches from my cheek and then dropped. “And I knew you were mine. I would have done anything for you.”

“Right,” I said, scoffing.

“It's true,” Sookie said, and I almost believed her. “Maybe you never realized what I was willing to give because you were too busy trying to think of what you could take.”

“Where you want it?” Fat Danny huffed, and without waiting for an answer, he dropped the box at my feet. “Could you hurry it up?” He lumbered toward the car, shoved his body behind the wheel, and turned up the air conditioner. Even though he positioned the jets on his purpling face, most of the cold air flew out the open doors.

“We just saying goodbye,” Sookie said, trying to placate him.

“Then say it in English,” Fat Danny wheezed, trying to suck in the cooling air. “Li' this: Good. Bye.”

“Wait.” I grabbed Sookie as she bent toward the door. “That's it?” I said, twisting her arm. “You can't leave me like this. I won't let you.”

“Je-ez Louise!” Fat Danny griped. “What she want now?”

Sookie wrenched away and slid into the seat, but kept the car door open. “Fat Danny,” she said. She used English, but I know she spoke to me. “When I was little girl, my mama tell me one fox story. This fox had good life in—what you call it? plenty trees, grass, wild animals—we call
sup.
But this little fox not happy. She jealous—jealous of the humans in the village. She all the time cry: ‘I want warm house and clothes and shoes on feet.' ”

Fat Danny groaned. “Sookie,” he pleaded. “Let's go. I no feel too good.” He tugged at his collar, stained with a ring of sweat. He closed his eyes.

She reached behind her without looking, patted him on the thigh, and continued her story. “Little Fox decide she will turn herself human. So she make like a human girl and sat in road until somebody find her. One farmer, he find and take her home and love her like daughter. The fox girl try to live like people, but she have secret: animal hunger.

“One night, she cannot stand it. She eat the farmer's pig and chickens and still she hungry. She eat his goat. Still she hungry. She have to eat the farmer. ‘But I loved you,' cried the farmer. The fox, she cry, too, and say, ‘But I'm hungry.' ”

“What kine story is that?” complained Fat Danny. “Never even have one happy ending.”

Sookie slammed the door shut as I jumped out of the way. She rolled down the window. “Fat Danny,” she said, “only Americans believe in happy endings.”

I stared at Sookie. “I don't get it. What does that story have to do with anything? What does that have to do with you leaving me?”

“Do you feel sorry for the fox, Hyun Jin?” she asked.

“I don't know,” I said, irritated. “Sure. If that's the right answer, I'll feel sorry for her. Maybe that fox girl had a family to feed or something.”

Sookie shook her head. “The people still get eaten,” she said. “I'm changing the ending before I get eaten.”

“Huh?” I said.

She smiled thinly. “You're the fox, Hyun Jin. Making yourself what you're not to get more than you need. In the end, you'll destroy yourself and everyone around you.”

I gasped. “You're a bitch, Sookie, and you always were.”

Her lips flattened and she looked out the front window. “The problem with you, Hyun Jin,” she said, “is that you cannot see people as they really are. You've always thought I was like you.”

“Aren't you, Sookie?” I asked, and I truly didn't know. “You're my sister.”

Fat Danny frowned, looking from Sookie to me. “Watchu saying?” He tapped Sookie's shoulder with a beefy paw. “What did she say?”

“Nothing,” Sookie snapped. “She just say, ‘Goodbye.' Go.”

She turned a crank and her window rolled up, closing her in, and for a brief moment, I saw our faces pressed together, merged in a trick of light and reflection.

Then Fat Danny stepped on the gas pedal and the car jerked forward. I watched the back of Sookie's head, waiting for a last look, a final acknowledgment. There wasn't any.

Juggling Myu Myu on one hip, I lifted my box of clothes and walked through the glass doors to the ticket counter. I scanned the list of cities, wondering how far into the forest three hundred dollars would take me.

 

The ticket agent looked at me blankly. “Where?” she asked again.

I took a deep breath, concentrating on my pronunciation. “Wai-Ma-Na-Lo.”

“Waimanalo,” she repeated, tilting her head so that the oversize orchid above her ear appeared about to topple her over. “Not Waimea? Not Wailuku?”

I shook my head, and gesturing to the pad and pencil behind her desk, I wrote the address from memory: 94-729 Waikupanaha Street, Waimanalo, Hawai‘i, U.S.A.

“Ma'am,” the ticket lady said, “you don't need an airplane ticket to go there.”

Glaring, I snapped, “I can't fly there myself.”

“No need.” She smiled and pointed out the door. “Take a taxi. No
hu-hu.
”

“Hungh,” I grumped, sounding like Lobetto when he thought I was acting like an idiot. I snuggled Myu into the cardboard box, then lugged the thing to the taxi station.

The taxidriver whistled between his teeth when I showed him the address. “Long drive, this.” He eyed me. “About forty dollars long.”

Lips pressed into a thin line, I nodded.

“Okay, then.” The driver jumped out of his seat and popped open the trunk. “Let me get that box for you.”

“Wait!” I set the box down, opened the lid, and lifted Myu to my shoulder. “Okay, then,” I said, repeating his words.

“That's one baby in there,” the driver said. He shook his head, gaping at me, then threw the box into the trunk.

Before starting up the car, the driver opened his glove compartment and pulled out a mapbook. “W-w-w,” he murmured. “Wai-wai-wai.” He flipped through the pages, using his fingers to sight the longitudinal lines of the grid. “Got it!” he announced, and pulled away from the curb.

I knew this was the same route that Yoon took on the day she picked Sookie and me up from the airport; there was only one major road into town from the airport. But the trip was different in the dark. I couldn't see the ramshackle houses on the hillside, the strings of laundry hanging to dry from squat, gray apartments, the broken pavement and tenement housing under the freeway.

Instead, I hurtled through a darkness punctuated by the occasional exclamation of a street lamp, across an unknown landscape. The driver took us up a cliff, the road winding around the mountain's lush hair of verdant green, then into and through the hole in its belly. “This the Like Like,” the driver intoned, his voice hollow. The shrieking spin of the taxi's wheels echoed through the long tube of the tunnel.

When we emerged on the other side, I let go of the breath I hadn't been aware I was holding. Below me stretched the curve of the ocean, white-capped waves glinting in the light from the thin smile of the moon sitting low on the horizon. We drove down the mountain toward the water, the road narrowing from four lanes to two, then, finally, as we cut inland, to one that snaked deeper into the brush, weaving through vine-covered poles. We encountered a closed-for-business Jack-in-the-Box—the giant dome of its white-headed clown seeming to pop up on the corner out of nowhere—then continued on, past a few paddocks fencing in a couple of bony horses or two or three wiry goats, past small wooden homes more than partially engulfed by the wild growing things.

At a sign that read ROCKY ROAD EGG FARM, the taxi driver turned a corner and stopped. “This here Waikupanaha Street.”

I nodded, trying not to breathe in the thick stench of manure. My eyes watered and I gasped, “Keep going, but slow.” I stared out the window, straining to spot anything—post, building, mailbox—with numbers.

The driver eased the car into a slow crawl up the street. He turned on the radio and it wailed, “She's a ho-o-o-onky tonk woman! Gimme, gimme, gimme some honky—” before he clicked it off with a grunt. “I just don't get this kind of music nowadays,” he complained. “I mean, is that supposed to be a love song?”

“Stop!” I yelled. “This is it!”

The driver braked hard and though we were traveling only about ten miles per hour, it was fast enough to send me sliding off the seat at the sudden stop. Myu Myu squawked, smashed between my chest and the front seat. “Sorry, sorry,” muttered the cabbie. He squinted out the window. “You sure you want out here?”

I followed his gaze. The numbers 94-729 were painted on a wooden board and fastened to a chain-link fence. “I think so,” I said, then more firmly: “Yes.” I pulled Myu to my face, kissing her forehead, then opened the car door.

The driver set my box down underneath the address sign, then helped me out. “You got everything?” he asked as I handed him two twenties. “Sure you can manage?”

I nodded, already bending to settle Myu Myu into the box. She whimpered, and I jiggled the box. She rolled onto her back. I shifted my arms, adjusting to her moving weight, and left the lid of the box open so she could see my face. “It's going to be all right,” I told her. “We're going to hide out here for a while.”

Listening to the song of the crickets, which filled my ears in tandem with the beating rhythm of my heart, I followed the fence until I found the gate. Balancing the box against one knee, I lifted the latch and started up the gravel road. There was just enough morning light to make out the long, looming shadows of black-screened hothouses on either side of the path. I edged close enough to one of them to peer through the mesh into a jungled world. Plants in baskets hung from the ceiling, their twisting, groping tendrils long enough to sweep the floor. Palms grew up from the ground, leafy fingers scratching at the sides and tops of the hothouse. And on the rows of tables that filled the enclosure, hundreds of potted plants in various stages of infancy stretched their heads, limbs straining, toward the shadowed sky.

“Hallooo!” The greeting was almost immediately drowned out by the baying of dogs. Three large mongrels bounded forward, barking as they circled me. A smaller dog with long, matted fur ran toward my ankles, teeth bared and nipping.

I wrapped my arms around the box, keeping my body between it and the dogs as much as I could. Myu Myu whimpered at their noise and burrowed under my clothes. I kept my eyes on the dogs, afraid to turn my back to them.

“Shoo, shoo! Comet, Cupid, go on, you mangy mutts.” A flannel-sleeved arm swung at the dogs. They dodged the blows but slunk away. “Can I help you?”

I looked up into a craggy face, weathered by the sun despite the large straw hat perched above it. “Yes, I . . . uh.” I frowned into the person's face, unsure if this was a man or a woman, unsure of how I should address him or her.

The person smiled, revealing bright blue front teeth, and stuck out a gloved hand. “I'm Geraldine, the big boss. You can call me Gerry.” The fingers of the glove were also stained blue. “Oh, excuse me.” Geraldine, the-big-boss-Gerry, stuck the glove into her mouth and tugged it off. Grinning around her glove, she offered her bared hand.

“My name Hyun Jin,” I told her, touching her palm. “I looking for my uncle. Synang Man Lee. He here?” I glanced around the nursery, almost expecting him to appear, summoned by the commotion.

Gerry frowned. “Singhand, Sigmund, whatever, Lee? No one here by that name.”

“I don't understand,” I stammered, my knees buckling. The box tilted as inside Myu Myu slid from one corner to the other. “I got, my father got a letter from him. Synang Man Lee. This address.”

“Lee. Lee. Lee.” Woman slapped her glove across the thighs of her baggy jeans. “Korean guy?” When I nodded, she shouted, “Oh! Down the street a ways, at 789, there's one Lee, a FOB from Korea. Ziggy Lee.”

I laughed, embarrassed at remembering the address wrong and dizzy with relief. I turned to walk back down the path, already constructing what I would tell him: how my mother always talked about him, her favorite cousin; how she sobbed when I left her, making me promise to look him up; how she knew that he would look after me and my child.

Then Gerry called out, “But he's not there anymore. Good riddance, I say. Handsome buggah, but turned into one
pakalolo
head, him and his friends.”

“Not there?” I repeated. The woman's face swayed in front of me, back and forth like one of the palms in her hothouses.

“Went to California about five, maybe six, years ago. San Francisco, I think,” she said. Her words, like the crickets' chirping, sounded both far away and right in my head at the same time. “Strange guy. Whoever heard of a Oriental trying for find hisself? Thought that was for those
haole
hippies.”

The box slipped out of my hands, crashed to the ground with a thump. Myu Myu tumbled out, skidding across gravel, screaming—the high-pitched keening of a wounded animal. The dogs charged forward, frenzied and howling, that little hairy one chasing its own tail and yip-yip-yipping; Gerry shouted, an ongoing siren: “Oh my God! Comet, Cupid, get away! Oh my God! Back, Blitzen! It's a baby! No, Vixen! Oh my God! A baby!” And then it was as if those long-limbed vines in the hothouses burst through the seams, whipped around my head, and yanked. Eyes rolling up into my head, I dropped to all fours, ear pressed to earth, and heard the world singing like the crickets, with that in-and-out beat of the tides, of the blood in our veins, of the panting of the fox. Then everything stopped, went dead, and I knew that it was all over. I had nowhere else to go. I was run to the ground.