The Orphan Master's Son (29 page)

But Jun Do wouldn't take the dog. “It's a gift for Sun Moon,” he said. “Will you get it to her for me?”

Jun Do could see the questions moving through Comrade Buc's eyes, but he voiced none of them. Instead, Comrade Buc offered a simple nod.

The landing gear was lowered, and on approach, the goats on the runway somehow knew the moment to wander away. But touching down, Dr. Song saw the vehicles that were waiting to meet the plane, and he turned, panic on his face.

“Forget everything,” he called to the Minister and Jun Do. “The plan must completely change.”

“What is it?” Jun Do asked. He looked at the Minister, whose eyes showed fear.

“There's no time,” Dr. Song said. “The Americans never intended to return what they stole from us. You got that? That's the new story.”

They huddled in the galley, bracing themselves as the pilots leaned hard on the brakes.

“The new story is this,” Dr. Song said. “The Americans had an elaborate plan to humiliate us. They made us do groundskeeping and cut the Senator's weeds, yes?”

“That's right,” Jun Do said. “We had to eat outside, with our bare hands, surrounded by dogs.”

The Minister said, “There was no band or red carpet to greet us. And they drove us around in obsolete cars.”

“We were shown nice shoes at a store, but then they were put away,” Jun Do said. “At dinner, they made us wear peasant shirts.”

The Minister said, “I had to share my bed with a dog!”

“Good, good,” Dr. Song said. He had a desperate smile on his face, but
his eyes sparkled with the challenge. “This will speak to the Dear Leader. This might save our skins.”

The vehicles on the runway were Soviet Tsirs, three of them. The crows were all manufactured in Chongjin, at the Sungli 58 factory, so Jun Do had seen thousands of them. They were used to move troops and cargo, and they had hauled many an orphan. In the rainy season, a Tsir was the only thing that could move at all.

Dr. Song refused to look at the crows or their drivers smoking together on the running boards. He smiled broadly and greeted the two men who were there to debrief them. But the Minister, grim faced, couldn't stop staring, at the tall truck tires, the drum fuel tanks. Jun Do suddenly understood that if someone were to be transported from Pyongyang to a prison camp, only a crow could get you over the bad mountain roads.

Jun Do could see the giant portrait of the Great Leader Kim Il Sung atop the airport terminal. But the two debriefers led them in a different direction—past a group of women in jumpsuits who faced a pile of shovels as they did their morning calisthenics and past a plane whose fuselage lay on the ground, blowtorched into four sections. Old men seated on buckets were stripping the copper wire from it.

They came to an empty hangar, voluminous inside. Potholes in the cement floor were pooled with muddy water. There were several mechanics' bays filled with tools, lifts, and workbenches, and Dr. Song, the Minister, and Jun Do were each placed in one, just out of sight of one another.

Jun Do sat at a table with the debriefers, who began going through his things.

“Tell us about your trip,” one said. “And don't leave anything out.”

There was a hooded typewriter on the table, but they made no move to use it.

At first, Jun Do only mentioned the things they'd agreed upon—the indignities of dogs, the paper plates, of eating under the hot sun. As he spoke, the two men opened his bourbon and, drinking, both approved. They divided his cigarettes right in front of him. They seemed especially fond of the little flashlight, and they interrupted him to make sure he wasn't hiding another. They tasted his beef jerky, tried on his calfskin gloves.

“Start again,” the other one told him. “And say it all.”

He kept listing the humiliations—how there was no band at the airport, no red carpet, how Tommy had left his spoor in the backseat. Like animals, they had been made to eat with their bare hands. He tried to remember how many bullets had been fired from the old guns. He described the old cars. Did he mention the dog in his bed? Could he have a glass of water? No time, they said, soon this would be over.

One debriefer turned the DVD in his hand. “Is this high definition?” he asked.

The other debriefer waved him off. “Forget it,” he said. “That movie's black-and-white.”

They snapped several pictures with the camera, but could find no way to view them.

“It's broken,” Jun Do said.

“And these?” they asked, holding up the antibiotics.

“Female pills,” Jun Do told them.

“You'll have to give us your story,” one of them said. “We'll need to get all of it down. We're going to be right back, but while we're gone, you should practice. We'll be listening, we'll be able to hear everything you say.”

“Start to finish,” the other man said.

“Where do I start?” Jun Do asked him. Did the story of his trip to Texas begin when the car came for him or when he was declared a hero or when the Second Mate drifted off into the waves? And finish? He had a horrible feeling that this story was nowhere near finished.

“Practice,” the debriefer said.

Together, they left the repair bay, and then he could hear the muffled echoes of the Minister now telling his story. “A car came for me,” Jun Do said aloud. “It was morning. The ships in the harbor were drying their nets. The car was a Mercedes, four-door, with two men driving. It had windshield wipers and a factory radio …”

He spoke to the rafters. Up there, he could see birds bobbing their heads as they looked down upon him. The more detailed he made his story, the more strange and unbelievable it seemed to him. Had Wanda really served him iced lemonade? Had the dog actually brought him a rib bone after his shower?

When the debriefers returned, Jun Do had only recited his story to the part about first opening the cooler of tiger meat on the plane. One of
them was listening to the Minister's iPod, and the other one looked upset. For some reason, Jun Do's mouth went back to the script. “There was a dog on the bed,” he said. “We were forced to cut brush, the seat had been spoored.”

“You sure you don't have one of these?” one asked, holding up the iPod.

“Maybe he's hiding it.”

“Is that true? Are you hiding it?”

“The cars were ancient,” Jun Do said. “The guns dangerously old.”

The first story kept coming back into his mind, and he became paranoid that he might accidentally say that the phone had rung four times and the Senator had said three words into it. Then he remembered that was wrong, the phone had rung three times, and the Senator had spoken four words, and then Jun Do tried to clear his mind because that was wrong, the phone never rang, the American President didn't call at all.

“Hey, snap out of it,” one of the debriefers said. “We asked the old man where his camera was, and he said he didn't know what we were talking about. You all got the same gloves and cigarettes and everything.”

“There's nothing else,” Jun Do said. “You've got everything I own.”

“We'll see what the third guys says.”

They handed him a piece of paper and a pen.

“It's time to get it down,” they said, and left the bay again.

Jun Do picked up the pen. “A car came for me,” he wrote, but the pen barely had any ink in it. He decided to skip to when they were already in Texas. He shook the pen and added, “And took me to a boot store.” He knew the pen only had one more sentence in it. By pressing hard he scratched out, “Here my humiliations began.”

Jun Do lifted the paper and read his two-sentence story. Dr. Song had said that what mattered in North Korea was not the man but his story—what did it mean, then, when his story was nothing, just a suggestion of a life?

One of the crow drivers entered the hangar. He came to Jun Do, asked him, “You the guy I'm taking?”

“Taking where?” Jun Do asked.

A debriefer came over. “What's the problem?” he asked.

“My headlights are shot,” the driver said. “I have to go now or I'll never make it.”

The debriefer turned to Jun Do. “Look, your story checks out,” he said. “You're free to go.”

Jun Do lifted the paper. “This is all I got,” he said. “The pen ran out of ink.”

The debriefer said, “All that matters is that you got something. We sent your actual paperwork in already. This is just a personal statement. I don't know why they make us get them.”

“Do I need to sign it?”

“Couldn't hurt,” the debriefer said. “Yes, let's make it official. Here, use my pen.”

He handed Jun Do the pen Dr. Song had been given from the mayor of Vladivostok.

The pen wrote beautifully—he hadn't signed his name since language school.

“Better take him now,” the debriefer told the driver. “Or he'll be here all day. The one old guy asked for extra paper.” He gave the driver a pack of American Spirit cigarettes, then asked the driver if he had the medics with him.

“Yeah, they're in the truck,” the driver said.

The debriefer handed Jun Do his DVD of
Casablanca
and his camera and his pills. He led Jun Do to the hangar door. “These guys are headed east,” he told Jun Do. “And you're going to catch a ride with them. Those medics are on a mission of mercy, they're true heroes of the people, those guys, the hospitals in the capital need them like you can't believe. So if they need help, you help them, I don't want to hear later that you were being lazy or selfish—you got that?”

Jun Do nodded. At the door, though, he looked back. He couldn't see Dr. Song or the Minister, the way they were tucked back in the repair bays, but he could hear Dr. Song's voice, clear and precise. “It was a most fascinating journey,” Dr. Song was saying. “Never to be repeated.”

Nine hours in the back of a crow. The washboard road rattled his guts, the engine vibrated so much he couldn't tell where his flesh ended and the wooden bench began. When he tried to move, to piss through the slats to the dirt road below, his muscles wouldn't answer. His tailbone had gone
from numb to fire to dumb. Dust filled the canopy, gravel shot up through the transaxles, and his life returned to enduring.

Also in the back of the truck were two men. They sat on either side of a large white cooler, and they wore no insignia or uniform. They were particularly dead-eyed, and of all the shit jobs on earth, Jun Do thought, these guys had it the worst. Still, he tried to make small talk.

“So, are you guys medics?” he asked them.

The truck hit a rock. The lid of the cooler lifted, and a wave of pink ice water sloshed out.

He tried again, “The guy at the airport said you two were real heroes of the people.”

They wouldn't look at him. The poor bastards, Jun Do thought. He'd choose a land-mine crew before being tasked out to a blood-harvesting detail. He only hoped they'd get him east to Kinjye before they made a stop to practice their trade, and he distracted himself by thinking of the gentle motion of the
Junma
, of cigarettes and small talk with the Captain, of the moment he turned the dials and his radios came to life.

They breezed through all the checkpoints. How the soldiers manning them could tell that a blood team was on board, Jun Do couldn't figure, but he wouldn't want to stop their truck either. Jun Do noticed for the first time that spinning in eddies of wind through the floorboards were the shells of hard-boiled eggs, a dozen of them, perhaps. This was too many eggs for a single person to eat, and nobody would share their eggs with a stranger, so it must have been a family. Through the back of the truck, Jun Do watched crop-security towers flash past, a local cadre in each with an old rifle to guard the corn terraces from the farmers who tended them. He saw dump trucks filled with peasants on their way to help with construction projects. And the roads were lined with conscripts bearing huge rocks on their shoulders to shore up washed-out sections. Yet this was happy work compared with the camps. He thought of whole families being carried off together to such destinations. If children had sat where he sat, if old people had occupied this bench, then absolutely no one was safe—one day a truck like this might come for him, too. The cast-off eggshells spun like tops in the wind. There was something carefree and whimsical about their movement. When the shells drifted near Jun Do's feet, he stomped them.