A Cab Called Reliable Read online

  “You like hot or mild?”

  “One dollar. Two dollar.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “Thank you. Thank you.”

  “Have good day to you.”

  “Is the good weather, huh?”

  “Oh sure, bu-ti-pul, bu-ti-pul.”

  As I grew tired of counting and correcting my father’s pronunciation errors, I closed my eyes and leaned against the hot dog buns, telling myself he was better off underground, masked by a dark helmet, and welding the ceilings and walls of the Clarendon subway station. Quarters and pennies fell from the counter, bounced off my ankle, and landed onto the floor. As my father stooped down to pick them up, I heard a woman’s voice from outside complaining, “How do you expect me to eat this half smoke? Do you realize it’s practically raw?” Not understanding what was being said, my father nodded and assured her that yes, yes, this half smoke, mild half smoke. The woman said she knew it was mild; the problem was, it was raw. Before my father could once again assure her that it was a half smoke and that it was indeed mild, and before she could say that it was raw, raw, raw, I pulled on my father’s pants leg and in Korean told him to give the woman a burnt one because the one she got was undercooked. “Oh, law,” he said, and happily replaced her half smoke with another. After she left, he clicked the tong and tapped it against the counter, and from where I sat, he looked as if he would break into a nervous dance like a circus monkey. He sat on a box behind the driver’s seat, rubbed his eyes, and rested his head against the shelf that held boxes of Now & Laters, chocolate bars, peanut butter cups, lollipops, chewing gum, Jolly Ranchers, Fireballs, Tootsie Rolls, cigars, and M&Ms.

  Throwing a straw at me, he said, “Why don’t you get out of there and help? It’s not easy, you know.” He massaged his ankle with his right hand, while the other searched for a cigarette.

  Curling up against the buns, I told him I was tired because I was studying the night before, and when I got through, I only slept for three hours because I was having horrible nightmares.

  “What does a little brat know about nightmares?”

  The sun was shining outside, and all sorts of sounds came in through our van window. Strollers, feet on concrete, feet on grass, cars, and talk, talk, talk. I could even hear the sound of people’s hands rising to shield their eyes from the sun, fingers pointing to a building in the sky or to the perfect tree for lunch in the shade and a family snapshot. The roaster hummed above me. My father opened a pack of gum, and selecting two pieces, he asked again what kind of nightmares little brats had.

  I gave him my I-don’t-know-and-I-don’t-care shrug, closed my eyes, and tried to remember the first five sentences of my story that would win first place in the school’s annual writing contest. This year the students were to write on either “My Family” or “What the Future Holds for Me.” My story began:

  When I lived in Korea, I used to climb the cypress tree that grew near the village well. From the highest branch, I could see the gate, the tiles on the roof of our house, and the enclosed veranda where my mother would be peeling and stringing whole persimmons to dry for the upcoming holiday. She wore a beautiful green hanbok, and her hair was braided in a tight bun held by a jade pin. The Thanksgiving holiday is one of the most important holidays in Korea, when all members of the family gather together to pay respect to their ancestors. My name is Ahn Joo Cho, and I was born in Korea.

  My teacher loved anything I wrote that was about Korea. She sighed and became teary-eyed when I showed her Korean dolls, ornaments of straw slippers, drums, long pipes, back scratchers, chopsticks, and even silk flowers that were made in Hong Kong.

  A customer came to the window wanting two salted pretzels. He tapped his hands on the counter and sighed, ooo-wah, ooo-wah, between each four count. I did not stand and look out to see if he was a black man, but I was certain that he was. After he paid and left, my father opened a bag of popcorn, ate a handful, dropped a piece on me, ate some more, and dropped another piece on me.

  “Stop it,” I said and tried to kick him. He dodged me. Sitting on the box behind the driver’s seat, he threw popcorn at me and told me to get up, get out, take a walk to the pencil top, and if the line wasn’t too long, take the elevator all the way to the top because you could see everything from there.

  “I’m tired,” I said.

  Throwing more popcorn at me, he asked what would make a little kid so tired all the time.

  “Not all the time. I’m just tired right now,” I said, shaking the popcorn out of my hair.

  “Aren’t you hungry?” he asked, putting popcorn in his mouth. When I didn’t answer, he extended his legs and nudged me with his foot. “Joo-yah, Joo-yah, aren’t you hungry? Aren’t you hungry?”

  I sat up, pushed my back against the wall, pumped my legs and kicked my feet at him, breathing out I-hate-yous and telling him to take that, take that, take that. My father stood up, hopped around the truck like a boxer dodging my feet, and said, “You want to fight, you want to fight, huh?” Each time he knuckled me on my head.

  “Stop it,” I yelled, and tried to punch his knees, but he moved too quickly for me.

  “Does that hurt? Does that hurt?” he said, knuckling my head harder each time.

  “No, it doesn’t hurt!” I yelled back.

  “That doesn’t hurt, huh? Does that hurt? Does that hurt?” he cried, pinching my arms and chest.

  Trying to hold back my tears because I did not want my father to see that he had hurt me, I flapped my arms at him like a propeller. He grabbed my wrists and said, “What’s wrong with this little brat? Is she going into some kind of a seizure? Joo-yah, stop it. You’re going to run us out of business.”

  Min Joo and my mother were the last things on my mind, but when I spat at my father and he looked as if about to strike me deaf, I quickly cried out, “What did you do with them? Where’s Min Joo? Where’s my mother?”

  He wiped off my spit with the back of his hand, then squatted down to pick up the popcorn, telling me to get back into the corner before I ran him out of business.

  I returned to my corner and curled up against the metal wall with my back to him. Tapping my fingertips against the truck, I told myself that it was good I did not cry in front of him because he would have said or done something to make me laugh, and laughing would have been the beginning of my liking him. My wrists, shoulders, and spots on my chest tingled with pain. I tapped my fingertips against the truck, whispered Boris Bulber’s name, remembering the afternoons we kissed; I was teaching him long division.

  Boris Bulber. Boris Bulber. After that kiss, I had told him he looked retarded with his fluttering eyelids, shaking lower lip, and hunched-over back. His elbows on his knees and his palms over his ears, he had swung his head left, right, left again, repeating, “I’m not, I’m not. I’m not retarded.”

  I had wanted to catch his swinging head and cradle it on my chest. I wanted to carry Boris on my back along the trolley tracks my father had once driven past on our way to Arlington Clinic for my measles and tetanus shots. I remembered how the tracks made a circle around treeless hills of overgrown grass, the dried yellow leaned into and over the green. Next to the track was a baseball field, and between them, a creek trickled through. I saw the six-inch wooden slabs laid evenly between packed gravel, iron railings fixed to the ground by rusty iron nails, and heard the brush of the grass when the wind blew. Boris would be heavy on my back, but I would carry him around the trolley track, and when we returned to the place we had begun, I would take him to the steepest hill, whisper, “Boris, look how high we’ve climbed,” and gently press him into the grass. Legs first, back, shoulders; then, cradling his neck in my hand, I would settle his head on the ground. But that afternoon when he asked me for another kiss, I kicked his shin, told him to wake up, told him to take his plastic leg somewhere else because I didn’t have time to fool around with a handicapped boy who didn’t know his long division.

  With my fingert
ip, I traced numbers on the wall of my father’s truck, divided forty-five into one hundred and five, then traced letters, words, phrases:

  Ahn Joo was here. BB + AJC together forever.

  Then I wrote the next five lines of my story that would win first place:

  Korea is divided into two nations at the thirty-eighth parallel, and the nation of South Korea is known as the land of the morning calm. Its capital city is Seoul, but I was born in a village near Pusan. My parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were born there as well. The village is called the One-Hundred-Year-Old Mountain and is known for its saltwater fish, anchovy, and herring.

  “Joo-yah, get out of there. You’ll get sick. Take a walk. Eat something,” my father said. “At least sit up. Go sit up there. You can push the seat back.” I told him I was fine. “Aren’t you hungry? Do you want a hot dog?” I was hungry, so I told him I would take one with mustard. I sat up to eat the hot dog and asked my father, “What’s herring?”

  “What’s the spelling?” he asked.

  “H-E-R-R-I-N-G.”

  The World Book in school had told me Pusan was known for its saltwater fish, anchovy, and herring. It also told me that Korea was known for strong family ties. Families lived in small villages, worked on farms, and remained loyal to each other. The family was more important than the individual or the nation. Grandparents, parents, sons, unmarried daughters, the sons’ wives and their children all lived happily together. To illustrate this, there was a photograph of a family of twelve or more members sitting on a porch eating supper. In the center of the photograph sat a girl my age, with hair cropped above her earlobes, listening to someone who had been cut out of the picture. Her sisters and brothers were looking in that direction as well. I think they were having anchovies and herring for dinner.

  My father turned his left ear up as if listening for distant music, repeated the letters in order, and looked for his Korean-English dictionary in the front of the truck. As he fingered through the pocket dictionary, he asked himself what herring might be, what could it possibly mean? When he found the word, he pointed at it, and without lifting his eyes from the page, he said, “You’re talking about Chung uh.”

  “Herring,” I said and stood up to get a drink.

  “Chung uh is very expensive fish,” he said. Pointing his fingers at his chest, he continued, “It’s blue. It has very many tiny bones. You can eat them, the bones, that is. We caught some at … where was it? Was it in Woodbridge? Was it in Octon River? Acton? Octon? They’re this thin. Remember we caught so many that we threw some away? But they weren’t the real kind. They’re good fried. They’re called Chung uh because they’re very blue, as blue as the ocean.”

  I told him I didn’t remember fishing for herring.

  “That’s right. You didn’t go,” he said. He tucked the dictionary under his armpit and took my soda bottle to twist open the top. Dropping a straw through the opening, he returned the bottle to me.

  “Isn’t there a lot of herring in Pusan?” I asked.

  “There’s plenty of herring in Pusan. But Pusan’s known for its belt fish,” he said.

  My mother had fried us belt fish once in America, but after finding white, pebblelike growths on them, she never bought or fried another.

  “Are you sure it’s belt fish?” I asked, not remembering the World Book ever telling me anything about belt fish in Pusan.

  With outstretched arms, he said they grew as long as belts that could hold up the pants belonging to a fat man. Holding his middle finger up at me, he said that his sister used to cut the fish into pieces about this long. I laughed at my father because he did not know he was signaling his daughter to fuck herself. Encouraged by my laughter, he continued, “The meat grows in four long strips. She used to pull off the two outer strips for herself because of the bones on the sides. She gave me the two inner strips. She used to fry them until the silver turned gold.”

  “What turned gold?”

  “The belt fish. The skin of the belt fish.”

  Through our window, above the moving heads of the people passing by our truck from left to right and right to left, I could see the lawn. The great big lawn, big enough for three men to stand in a triangle and throw an orange Frisbee to each other. Picnic blankets were spread and kept from flying away by the weight of iceboxes, sneakers, strollers, and grandmothers, who could not go very far. Someone was rolling down the hill in a sleeveless shirt, and I shuddered because the grass blades would nick his arms good and his mother would yell at him, while he was still dizzy in the head.

  He would be dizzy for a very long time. Four girls jumped around in black trash bags, chasing each other and screaming when one came close to tagging them. Some people walked down the lawn. Others walked up the lawn to be closer to the pencil top, which was made of white rock and was standing tall above the moving flags and the seated people waiting to go inside.

  “Where is she now?” I asked, watching a boy and a girl playing soccer with a basketball.

  My father leaned back on his chair, stretched out his legs, and watched me finish my lunch. “You can have another,” he said.

  “I’m full,” I said.

  He sold a customer a Danish and two bottles of orange juice. Then he sat back down and told me that his sister was still in Korea. He called her noo nah, what Min Joo used to call me, and told me that she had once been accepted to study at one of the best women’s universities in Korea, but the old man would not let her go, he would not pay for her tuition, he would not pay any of their tuitions, except the two youngest boys’, who belonged to his third and favorite wife. My father said that when tuition day came around, he was quick to hide because the old man got angry. When the old man got angry, he was light with his heavy hand, quick to strike anyone. He didn’t know how his brothers managed. They got their money, they kept off the farm doing minimal labor, they studied secretly; they loved studying, and they earned their medical degrees. My father told me that one of my uncles, the nose-throat-and-ear doctor, almost burned down the house while secretly reading by candlelight underneath a quilt.

  But my father thought it was more important to get on the old man’s good side by working on the farm. The old man would call him, Shin-ah! Shin-ah! My father mistakenly believed that working for the old man and his wife would somehow earn him some points—love points, he called them. But they called him only when they needed wood chopped, land plowed, water fetched. He would hear Shin-ah! Shin-ah! And he grew to hate the sound of his name.

  But it wasn’t my father who had it the worst in his family. Han-il noo nah, she was driven out of her mind and out of the house. After Grandmother was kicked out, my father said that Han-il noo nah lost it. She was wetting herself and listening with her ear pressed close to the walls. The old man’s back wasn’t strong enough to pull her away from the walls day in and day out, so he sent her away to marry one of his friends’ sons. It was a business deal. He owed his friend some money, and this way he got his debt canceled. My father didn’t see his sister for about a year. Then he got news that she was wetting herself and listening to the walls again. My father told me that she was now working at a Buddhist temple. She cooked the meals for the monks there. It was a beautiful temple, built on the side of a mountain, facing the sea. My father had visited there, a little outside Pusan. He said that Han-il noo nah seemed happy there.

  For the rest of the afternoon I sat in the passenger’s seat, telling myself never to go to the World Book for stories, and thinking about my poor aunt Han-il and how she was terribly wronged by her family, my father included. Behind me came the sound of coins being dropped into the metal money box and my father trying to tell his customers to have a good day. I wanted to write a story about my aunt Han-il, giving her another life because I did not believe she could be happy cooking meals for a bunch of silent men. I refused to participate in her suffering; she would be redeemed from that life into another by my imagination. When my father visited his sister, he had not noti
ced the unhappiness in her eyes. He was betrayed by the beauty of the mountain, the sea, and the temple.

  I turned around and asked, “Did she have children?”

  “Who?” he asked, wiping off the counter.

  “Your sister,” I said.

  “She had a son,” he said, and explained that the father would not let her near the baby because he was convinced that her insanity was contagious.

  That evening my father closed shop after selling the final egg roll. He tossed me a blueberry pie before starting the engine and said we would pick up cheeseburgers for dinner. As my father drove through the streets of D.C., he talked of having made this and this much money today, and if we kept this up a little longer, we would make this and this much by Christmas, and in no time we would have our own grocery store and live in a big brick house somewhere far away from Burning Rock Court.

  “Do you like the sound of that?” he asked.

  I told my father that yes, yes, it was all fine with me, but I was not listening to him. My mind had been on my aunt Han-il all afternoon, and during the drive back home she was still alive somewhere between my memory and imagination. I could not stop thinking about her and how I would save her from her misery. The sentences I had memorized and planned to write for the school contest were forgotten, and I began mouthing new words, new phrases, new sentences. As my father talked about good weather being good for business and bad weather being bad for business, I traced letters onto my left palm with my right index finger. I formed the first words of my new story that would surely win first place.

  9

  My teacher usually loved anything I wrote that was about Korea. But my submission for the Young Writers Contest disappointed her. She told me that the writing in my story about aunt Han-il was technically just fine, nearly professional. However, the story itself was difficult to believe. “One is required to suspend an unreasonable amount of one’s disbelief,” she said with a friendly frown.