The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [87]
“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