The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [90]
Jun Do gave her a wary look but did as he was told.
There was only one man with boots that might fit. The uppers had been patched many times, but the soles were from a pair of military boots. In his sleep, the man made a croaking noise, as if bubbles kept rising up his throat to pop in his mouth.
“Get them,” Mongnan said.
Jun Do began unlacing the boots. They wouldn’t make him put on a pair of work boots unless they had another ugly task in store for him—he could only hope it wasn’t burying all these fucking people.
While Jun Do was wriggling the man’s boots off, he woke. “Water,” he said, before he could even open his eyes. Jun Do froze, hoping the man wouldn’t come to. But the guy found his focus. “Are you a doctor?” the man asked. “An ore cart tipped over—I can’t feel my legs.”
“I’m just helping out,” Jun Do said, and it was true, when the boots slipped off, the man seemed not to notice. The man wore no socks. Several of his toes were blackened and broken, and some were missing, with the remaining stubs leaking a tea-colored juice.
“Are my legs okay?” the man asked. “I can’t feel them.”
Jun Do took the boots and backed away, back to where Mongnan had her camera set up.
Jun Do shook the boots and clapped them together, but no toes fell out. Jun Do lifted each boot and peeled back its tongue in an effort to peer as deep inside as he could—but he could see nothing. He hoped the missing toes had fallen off someplace else.
Mongnan raised the tripod to Jun Do’s height. She handed him a little gray slate and a chalk stone. “Write your name and date of birth.”
Pak Jun Do, he wrote, for the second time in one day.
“My birth date is unknown,” he told her.
He felt like a child when he lifted the slate to his chin, like a little boy. He thought, Why is she taking my picture? but he didn’t ask this.
Mongnan pressed a button and when the flash went off, everything seemed different. He was on the other side of the bright light now, and that’s where all the bloodless people on cots were—on the other side of her flash.
The medics yelled at him to lift a cot.
“Ignore them,” she said. “When they’re done, they’re going to sleep in the truck, and in the morning, they’re going home. You, we’ve got to take care of you before it’s too dark.”
Mongnan called to the guard for the barracks number of Pak Jun Do. When he told her, she wrote it on the back of his hand. “We don’t usually get people on Sundays,” she said. “You’re kind of on your own. First thing is to find your barracks. You need to get some sleep. Tomorrow’s Monday—the guards are hell on Monday.”
“I’ve got to go,” he said. “I don’t have time to bury anybody.”
She lifted his hand and showed him the barracks number written across the back of his knuckles. “Hey,” she said. “This is you now. You’re in my camera. Those are now your boots.”
She started walking him toward a door. Over his shoulder, he looked for the pictures of Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung. A flash of panic struck him. Where were they when he needed them?
“Hey,” one of the medics said. “We’re not done with him.”
“Go,” Mongnan said. “I’ll handle this.”
“Find your barracks,” she said. “Before it’s too dark. ”
“But then. What do I do then?”
“Do what everyone else does,” she said, and pulled from her pocket a milky white ball of corn kernels. This she gave to him. “If people eat fast, you eat fast. If they drop their eyes when someone comes around, so do you. If they denounce a prisoner, you chime in.”
When Jun Do opened the door, boots in hand, he looked out onto the dark camp, rising in every direction into the icy canyons of a huge mountain range, its peaks still visible in the last of the setting sun. He could see the glowing mouths of the mineheads and the torchy flicker of workers moving within. Ore carts pushed forth from them under human power, strobing from security lights that reflected off the slag ponds. Everywhere, cooking fires cast an orange glow upon the harmonica houses, and the acrid smoke of green firewood made him cough. He didn’t know where