The Overturned Truck
Out on the fields of Jeongok-ri, a bright blue truck was on the move, creeping through a course of T's and S's laid out in straw rope staked into the earth. Two men with flags stood off the course, and whenever a tire crossed the rope they shouted "Out of bounds!" and threw their flags up.
It was a kind of driving school. Twenty of the factory hands were learning to handle the truck under Ma-ryang's instruction, and Kijo stood off to one side, watching. Kim Doo-han had brought the truck early, and that gift of time was what let him raise drivers of his own. Training one took about a month. Once the Jeongok-ri ground, with its buried Paleolithic site, was sold, he would buy more trucks, and the drivers he was raising now could be thrown straight onto the job.
He meant to post two drivers to every truck. So long as a machine didn't break down, it must never sit dead for want of a man. That was how the Cheongsan factory would survive, and where the extra income would come from. Once he had trucks enough, he had no intention of hauling nothing but bricks. He had an expansion plan that ran on them.
If it works, I can drive the cost of hauling bricks down to nothing.
Full of that hope, Kijo watched the young men take their instruction with quiet pleasure. The students were wound as tight as cadets at an academy.
What did Ma-ryang do in China, that he handles people like this...
While he was wondering, a man sidled up behind him.
"Um... Chief."
"Brother Kim. What brings you here?"
Seo Gwang hemmed and hawed, and Kijo could see straight through him.
"You want to learn to drive?"
"Yes, Chief... One of my legs is a bit bad, but..."
"Wait just a moment. When the man in the truck gets down, I'll have Ma-ryang—"
"Thank you, Chief!"
The instant the truck stopped, Seo Gwang didn't even hear the rest. He ran for it and climbed straight into the driver's seat, and Ma-ryang's bellow broke over him at once.
"Who the hell are you? You son of a bitch!"
"Teach me to drive a little, too."
"Not a chance. Get down, and quick!"
"This your truck? The chief said I could, so who are you to tell me in or out!"
Their tender little exchange made Kijo laugh.
People...
To eyes that had lived all the way to ninety, Ma-ryang and Seo Gwang squabbling looked like nothing but children.
"Theory first. You think grabbing the wheel out of nowhere is going to work?"
Seo Gwang had no answer to that.
"Down!"
He was hauled off to one side of the empty lot and stood before a driver's seat drawn on a wooden board. Ma-ryang tapped the drawing with his pointer and called out the names, and Seo Gwang shouted them back at the top of his lungs.
"Brake!"
"B-braykee?"
Thwack. Ma-ryang's stick came down on his skull without mercy.
"Ah..."
Seo Gwang rubbed his head.
"Say the name right. Brake."
"Braykoo."
That much, Ma-ryang let pass.
"Accelerator!"
"A-ackselroo?"
Thwack. The pointer came down again.
"Ow..."
The pecking order between them had grown so brutally clear that Seo Gwang could only groan, and didn't dare let out a peep.
And they're the same age...
Kijo felt a little sorry for him. He could have taught Seo Gwang himself, but driving was better learned from a strict teacher. He was just about to slip away, so the man wouldn't be embarrassed, when a blast roared without warning from the direction of Eundae-ri.
Every head turned toward the sound. Dust from the explosion was climbing into the sky. Kijo ran straight for the truck, started it, and swung the nose toward the blast.
"Everybody in the truck!"
Ma-ryang and Seo Gwang climbed into the passenger seat, and the twenty students piled into the bed. The moment he was sure they were all aboard, Kijo drove for the explosion without wasting a second.
Don't let it be the people of Eundae-ri...
He was worried. After the armistice, scavenging shell casings had become a craze the country over. Ground where the fighting had been fiercest was littered with casings from American rifles and artillery, and gathering them to sell brought in a tidy sum, because the copper in them fetched a high price. Kijo himself had once thought that if he came back to 1953, he might try a casing business. He had let the idea go. Unexploded shells and mines lay thick around the casings, and people died at it often enough. He had no wish to make money by spending lives, and he had begged the people of Eundae-ri, over and over, not to go out hunting casings.
He pressed the accelerator deeper. What hurried him most was the children. A child who wanted something sweet could easily wander off into the fields and hills after casings. And he was not the only one in a hurry. Seo Gwang's face had gone pale with fear for Yeong-bae.
"Chief... it didn't go off over by Eundae-ri, did it?"
"It's a ways off from the village. Don't worry yourself too much."
Ma-ryang said it with his eyes narrowed, fixed on the column of dust. They ran the rutted dirt road at full speed, and when they reached the site the sight struck them dumb. An American truck had left the road and lay broken in two, sprawled where it had fallen. Another that had been on the road lay tipped on its side, and American soldiers were strewn all around.
A mine.
That was Kijo's guess. Right after the war, Yeoncheon had been a minefield in every direction. To hold the Chinese and North Korean troops, the Americans had sown mines from the air. When he cleared Eundae-ri, more than a hundred had come out of the ground, and it was heaven's own luck that not one person was hurt in the breaking of it. He had drilled them hard before they turned the soil, sending them into the waste with long iron rods, probing as they went. Beyond the roads the soldiers had graded, no one knew what lay waiting. The American truck must have swung off the narrow road to turn around, and met disaster there—Americans, struck by mines the Americans themselves had scattered.
The men, blank for a moment, were climbing down to help when Ma-ryang shouted.
"Don't get down! Stay where you are!"
Then, to Kijo:
"Brother, you'd best pull the truck well back."
Kijo understood. There might still be bombs in the ground around them. He reversed, and Ma-ryang was the first one off. He checked first what the wrecked truck had been carrying. Barbed wire, flung in every direction—and far too many Americans torn up by it. The blast had ripped the loaded coils and sent them scything over the soldiers. Only when he was sure the cargo wasn't something that would burn did he pick his way, carefully, toward the men sprawled on the ground.
From the driver's seat Kijo could see it too. Far too many of them looked past saving. Scraps of flesh hung caught in the brush, and some of the Americans were wound in the wire.
"All of you, down!"
At Ma-ryang's shout the students poured off the truck and ran to him. They hoisted the soldiers he pointed out onto their backs and loaded them aboard.
"That way! No—farther, on the left!"
Every time he shouted, they ran and carried another wounded man to the truck. When eleven had been saved, Ma-ryang came running back to Kijo.
"We go."
Seo Gwang turned on him.
"There are still people. The ones over there still look alive..."
"Alive isn't living. They'll be dead soon."
Kijo thought the same. To save the wounded Americans they had to reach the American base at Dongducheon. There was no hospital in Yeoncheon, and if they took the men to a Korean unit, it was doubtful anyone could save them. Meanwhile the worst of the wounded would die. Ma-ryang had chosen only those who might still be saved, and even their lives would be gone if they were not moved to the base at once.
"Let's go."
Kijo turned the truck with care on the road and pointed it toward Dongducheon. Forty minutes later they pulled up at the gate of the American unit. The guards took one look at a truck packed with wounded Americans and went white. Radios came up. In moments jeeps and ambulances were there, and the eleven wounded were raced to the division medical detachment. The chief of the military police came out himself to investigate, and asked Kijo how it had happened.
"An American truck hauling barbed wire through Yeoncheon looks to have hit a mine. I brought only the ones who seemed as if they might live. There are more casualties."
Kijo marked the place on a map, and American jeeps, trucks, and an ambulance set out for Yeoncheon, while a rescue helicopter lifted toward the site.
"I'd like to take down your particulars."
Kijo gave the MP chief his name, his age, his address, and his work without hesitation.
"Thank you. If something comes up later, I'll be in touch."
The man climbed into a jeep and left in a hurry to report to the division commander. While Kijo was speaking with him, Americans came with an insulated can and stirred cocoa into hot water. The students who had torn their own clothes in the truck bed to stanch the bleeding were shaking with cold and with the aftermath of it, and the Americans put cups of hot cocoa into their hands. They were halfway through the cocoa when a truck rolled out of the unit loaded with American cold-weather gear and issued two sets to each man—one to keep, and the other to give to his family or sell, as he liked. They did not stint on goods for the Koreans who had saved their comrades' lives.
A few of them, of course, looked at the blue truck with suspicion. But of the jeeps and trucks running around Korea, how many had not begun as American? Aside from the Japanese trucks still in use from the colonial years, and whatever had drifted in during the war, all of it had leaked out of American units.
Kijo took the students to the portrait shop in front of the division, meaning to warm them through before they started back for Yeoncheon. The painter stuffed the stove full of firewood. Kijo, Ma-ryang, and Seo Gwang stood outside with cigarettes, letting the breath come back to them. The shock of the dead and the badly wounded seemed to have caught Seo Gwang late; his face had gone hard. About the time the cigarette was finished, he seemed to have found a little strength, and he spoke.
"Hoo... Ma-ryang. I'm not learning to drive."
Ma-ryang, deadpan through all of it, lifted one eyebrow.
"Why? The flipped American truck scare you?"
Seo Gwang let out a short laugh.
"No. I'm going to learn from the chief."
What?
Kijo stared at him.
"You saw how the chief drives, didn't you? Wrenching that wheel around, stomping the ackselroo on a bad road!"
He looked at Kijo with open admiration.
"Ah, that was only because things were so desperate. Driving—you'd do better to learn it from my brother-in-law..."
"Aw, don't say that. Chief, you teach me."
Seo Gwang grinned and bobbed a bow.
"Heh. I can't drive. I only picked it up over my brother-in-law's shoulder, watching him teach."
"Come on. The chief, not able to drive? That truck was flying."
When Kijo looked plainly uneasy at the thought of private lessons, Ma-ryang stepped in.
"Seo Gwang. Don't be like that. Learn from me for one month. I'll have you driving that truck clear to the moon."
"You teach by hitting people. I want somebody gentle, like the chief, who still drives like a man."
"I'll teach you gentle. Learn from me. I'll teach you so thorough the truck'll feel like your sweetheart."
Well, now. Ma-ryang knew how to talk like that?
It was the first Kijo had heard of him managing anything so slick.
"Hey! I said I won't learn from a man who hits me! What am I, a donkey's foal? Learn while you crack me on the head?"
"Hey now. You want to get hit and learn? Hit, and then hit again? Don't be like that. Come out to the practice ground from tomorrow. I'll give you the courtesy of your years. Don't you worry about getting hit."
Ma-ryang worked at him in earnest. Kijo eased away and left the persuading to him. The pecking order of a few hours ago seemed to have flipped clean over, but what of it? Was teaching a man to drive an easy thing? It was the sort of work that split married couples and put curses in the mouth of a clergyman. And Kijo scarcely had time enough to tend to the business as it was.