The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [6]
From ahead came the body thud of someone falling in the dark, a sound Jun Do had heard a thousand times. Jun Do pulled up where the man was righting himself. His face was ghostly with a dusting of sand. They were huffing and puffing, their joined breath white in the dark.
The truth was that Jun Do never did that well in tournaments. When you fought in the dark, a jab only told your opponent where you were. In the dark, you had to punch as if you were punching through people. Maximum extension is what mattered—haymaker punches and great, whirling roundhouse kicks that took out whole swaths of space and were meant to cut people down. In a tournament, though, opponents could see moves like that coming from a mile away. They simply stepped aside. But a man on a beach at night, standing on the balls of his feet? Jun Do executed a spinning back kick to the head, and the stranger went down.
The dog was filled with energy—excitement perhaps, or frustration. It pawed at the sand near the unconscious man, then dropped its ball. Jun Do wanted to throw the ball, but he didn’t dare get near those teeth. Its tail, Jun Do suddenly realized, wasn’t wagging. Jun Do saw a glint in the dark, the man’s glasses, it turned out. He put them on, and the fuzzy glow above the dunes turned into crisp points of light in people’s windows. Instead of huge housing blocks, the Japanese lived in smaller, individual-sized barracks.
Jun Do pocketed the glasses, then took up the man’s ankles and began pulling from behind. The dog was growling and giving short, aggressive barks. When Jun Do looked over his shoulder, the dog was growling in the man’s face and using its paws to scratch his cheeks and forehead. Jun Do lowered his head and pulled. The first day in a tunnel is no problem, but when you wake on the second day from the darkness of a dream into true darkness, that’s when your eyes must open. If you keep your eyes closed, your mind will show you all kinds of crazy movies, like a dog attacking you from behind. But with your eyes open, all you had to face was the nothingness of what you were really doing.
When finally Jun Do found the boat in the dark, he let the dead weight fall into its aluminum cross members. The man opened his eyes once and rolled them around, but there was no comprehension.
“What did you do to his face?” Gil asked.
“Where were you?” Jun Do asked. “That guy was heavy.”
“I’m just the translator,” Gil said.
Officer So clapped Jun Do on the back. “Not bad for an orphan,” he said.
Jun Do wheeled on him. “I’m not a fucking orphan,” he said. “And who the hell are you, saying you’ve done this a hundred times. We come out here with no plan, just me running someone down? You didn’t even get out of the boat.”
“I had to see what you were made of,” Officer So said. “Next time we’ll use our brains.”
“There won’t be any next time,” Jun Do said.
Gil and Jun Do spun the boat to face the waves. They got battered while Officer So pull-started the motor. When the four of them were in and headed toward open water, Officer So said, “Look, it gets easier. Just don’t think about it. I was full of shit when I said I’d kidnapped twenty-seven people. I never kept count. As they come just forget about them, one after another. Catch somebody with your hands, then let them go with your mind. Do the opposite of keeping count.”
Even over the outboard, they could hear that dog on the beach. No matter how far out they got, its baying carried over the water, and Jun Do knew he’d hear that dog forever.
They stayed at a Songun base, not far from the port of Kinjye. It was surrounded by the earthen bunkers