The Child Sees His Father’s Back
I drove the old truck to the outskirts of Garden Queens.
Before long, my uncle’s junkyard came into view.
Yoon’s Junkyard & Auto Wrecking
A recycling and salvage operation that doubled as an auto graveyard.
Even through the windows, the stench of oil and raw metal seeped in.
A tower built from cars stacked one on top of another, stripped bare of their tires.
Below it, rainwater mixed with rust and ran in crimson streaks like tears left to dry.
Discarded engine oil had mingled with the soil and gone rotten. Sun-baked plastic bumpers melted all summer long before hardening into grotesque shapes.
I steered the truck through the canyon of dented cars.
Countless broken headlights.
It was as if I had driven into a land of the blind; they stared down at me with blank, milky, clouded eyes.
······.
As I passed through the valley of waste inside the junkyard, I thought about my uncle.
Before I regressed, when my parents died in a gang shootout, there were hardly any faces at the funeral I could call relatives.
My uncle stepped forward and declared himself my guardian after they were gone.
He shuttled between the incense room and the reception room, arguing with the funeral-home staff and keeping track of the hearse schedule.
He handled everything for me, from the funeral arrangements to my college tuition and living expenses.
After I graduated, I got a job, and on payday I would often tuck an envelope into my pocket and go see him.
Maybe it was some buried instinct telling me I had to repay the love I’d never been able to give my parents.
But my uncle never once accepted the money I offered him.
Instead, as if it were nothing at all, he would ask, “Are you eating well?” or “Are you sleeping enough?”
I was a fairly useless nephew, and because I was always busy, I didn’t visit him often.
The first time I learned of his death was when I was watching the evening news.
Some Korean man was on the broadcast—his identity released after he’d allegedly killed an entire gang alone with a gun and a homemade bomb.
They said he’d later been shot dead after a standoff with the police.
When I saw the photo on the screen, I couldn’t speak for a long time.
Later, I received the will he had left behind, and there was only a single short message inside it.
-I could not forgive the men who shot your mother and me. I’m sorry I couldn’t stay with you to the end, Sanha.-
After I regressed, I made a vow.
This time, in this life, I would stay with my uncle until the very end.
······Ah, there he is.
The uncle I had once known was now lying right in front of me.
I gave the horn a sharp blast.
My uncle, who had been lying beneath a wrecked car inspecting the undercarriage, emerged and looked up.
“Oh, nephew. What brings you here?”
He was tall, with a bristly beard and sharp, alert eyes.
He was much younger than the uncle I remembered.
I went straight over and hugged him.
He looked startled.
“What the hell, kid? You’ve got grease all over you.”
“It’s fine. I’m already covered in plenty.”
I grinned.
After working with crude oil, my clothes were already filthy with grime.
My uncle looked at me, then laughed heartily.
“Look at you. You finally look like a gas station owner’s son. Your father hates it when people call you that, but what’s he going to do? A gas station owner’s son is a gas station owner’s son.”
“That’s right. Haha.”
Why had it bothered me so much as a child to admit to something that obvious?
······But right now, there was something more urgent than regret.
“Uncle. I’m here because of my father. I need machinery I can use right away.”
“Your father? What happened?”
My uncle knew my parents’ situation, so he listened with serious attention.
“I need equipment to refine crude oil. A centrifuge, an industrial furnace, a fractionating column, cooling coils, and the like. I wrote the details down here in this memo pad.”
“······Hmm.”
My uncle turned the page over in his oily hands, rubbing his thumb across the paper.
Then he asked, “Why those? What are you planning to use them for?”
“I’m thinking of starting a business, and these are the pieces I need.”
“You? Starting a business?”
He stared at me, clearly surprised.
A moment of silence passed.
Then he nodded.
“Hmm. You’re the kid who taught himself without even asking for a single notebook and got into Harvard. I doubt you’ll get conned out there.”
My uncle led me to the equipment yard in one corner of the junkyard.
“But we don’t have a distillation tower.”
“Even your junkyard doesn’t have everything, huh?”
“Listen, smart-ass. To be precise, we do have one. It’s just so old you probably couldn’t use it. Some of the sections are broken too. But we do have a fractionating column we pulled from that refinery that went under the other day. Would that work? It looked usable, even if it was a little old.”
“A fractionating column? That’s the one I need. If anything, that’s even better.”
“Is it? Then that settles it.”
My uncle broke into a grin.
“We also have a stainless-steel heat exchanger instead of a copper cooling coil. Want that? It’s sturdier than copper and easier to clean.”
I answered by shooting him a thumbs-up.
The cooling efficiency was far better that way.
And then.
···Rrrr-
The forklift roared to life.
The huge industrial furnace, the centrifuge, the fractionating column my uncle had mentioned, and the stainless-steel heat exchanger were loaded one by one into the back of the truck.
While he was loading the cargo, my uncle looked at the black, sticky stains on the floor of the truck bed and asked, “What’s this? Did something leak from the truck?”
“I spilled something on the way here.”
I brushed it off vaguely.
If I had even a little time later, I planned to explain everything to him.
Once all the equipment had been loaded, I took the wad of ten-thousand-dollar bills my father had given me out of my pocket and held it out carefully.
“Uncle, here. I know it’s not enough. I’ll pay you back within ten days, exactly.”
“Forget it, kid.”
Just like before I regressed, my uncle didn’t even look at the bundle of cash.
“I know how things are with your aunt and uncle. I’d been worried that I never even got to give you allowance, let alone tuition, when you entered school. So I’m glad I can at least give you this.”
“Uncle······.”
“Quit saying that. It gives me the creeps, hearing a bearded guy like you sound like a puppy.”
With a wave of his hand, he turned away.
“Half the junk here isn’t even worth scrap prices anyway. If you need anything else, say the word. I’ll load it up.”
“Uncle, someday, once everything’s sorted out······ I’ll explain it all to you. Thank you.”
“I told you, forget it.”
With that, he went into the bedroom inside the container.
I clenched both fists.
My heart, which had gone cold on Wall Street, finally felt warm again as it beat.
* * *
“Huu-”
After several back-and-forth trips with the truck, I’d moved every piece of equipment into the gas station’s warehouse.
I stood in the middle of the storage space and looked around.
It was packed wall to wall with machinery.
I walked first to the massive cylindrical furnace.
It was a rusted hunk of steel taller than I was.
When I ran my hand across the surface, I felt rough welds and dents worn into the metal.
At the bottom was a combustion chamber fitted with a burner that had once burned scrap tires, and above it a circular pipe channel wound around to carry the heat through.
It felt like some driving core ripped straight out of a steampunk world.
These pipes are practically new. I could run this thing right now without any maintenance.
This furnace had originally been used to melt asphalt on highway repair sites.
Apparently, a construction company that had lost a federal roadwork bid had liquidated its equipment at a bargain price, and that was how it ended up in my uncle’s junkyard.
It had to withstand heat above 400 degrees, so the inner walls needed to be intact. I knocked on it with my hand, and the dull resonance suggested there were no cracks.
Good. Next.
I crouched in front of the centrifuge beside it.
It was a cylindrical machine the size of a barrel.
When I opened the lid, I saw the stainless-steel spinning drum inside, with black sludge caked hard on the bottom like a crust.
I checked the port for connecting the drain valve and overflow line, then inspected the bearings around the rotating shaft.
Bang, bang, bang—
I tapped the hollow drum with my hand, and it answered with a dry metallic echo.
This centrifuge had originally been used at a wastewater treatment plant.
Its job had been to separate solids from liquids in contaminated water. But when the plant was shut down for environmental regulation violations, all the equipment was seized and sent to auction, where my uncle had bought it for next to nothing.
I don’t know if it still runs properly. I’ll need to test it separately later.
I would use this to separate water, sand, and impurities from the crude oil.
If it failed to do its job, a steam explosion could occur inside the furnace, or sand could clog the pipes, so it was a critically important piece of equipment.
The third machine was the fractionating column.
A gigantic tower in the shape of a cylinder, easily more than five meters tall.
Its exterior was yellowed with rust, but when I knocked on it, the steel itself felt thick and solid.
Inside, multiple trays were stacked in layers, allowing components with different boiling points to be separated step by step.
At the bottom was the crude-oil feed inlet, and along the sides were output ports for gasoline, kerosene, and diesel.
This fractionating column had once been the core equipment of a small refinery that had gone bankrupt the day before yesterday.
When the creditors seized the entire plant and began dismantling the equipment for sale, my uncle had acquired it for scrap price.
Now that’s what I call striking gold.
I knocked on the steel plates with satisfaction.
There was sludge built up between the trays, but that was nothing a thorough cleaning couldn’t fix.
Finally, I examined the heat exchanger.
The pipe surfaces were smooth stainless steel, so there was no rust, though the welds along each seam were lumpy and uneven.
This heat exchanger had originally been cooling equipment used in a brewery.
Its job had been to rapidly cool the boiled beer wort, but when the brewery was absorbed into a major brand and all its aging equipment was replaced with modern machinery, this veteran piece ended up at a junkyard.
Let’s do good work together from now on, old-timers.
I ran my hand over every one of those machines, as though greeting elders who were every bit as old as I was.
Then, suddenly, I remembered a column I had read in the past.
A line from an interview with a veteran refinery engineer.
He had said:
“Refining is a world you read by the color of the flames rising from burning gas, the smell of crude lifting from the tanks, and the sound of steam flowing through the pipes.”
But I was no expert. I didn’t understand any of that visceral language.
······Now I have to get these running and refine the crude oil.
Obviously, I couldn’t do it alone.
I needed other hands for this.
And the only hands that came to mind were two.
Those warm hands that used to tuck me under one arm as a child, that lifted me high into the air, the thick, large, scarred hands always stained with oil so that their already dark skin looked even darker.
My father’s hands.
Once, I had been ashamed of them.
I wanted to hide those hands—hands that weren’t white like other fathers’, weren’t clean, and didn’t have a watch on the wrist.
But not anymore.
I left the warehouse at once and headed home.
Step. Step. Step. Step. Step.
The place I was headed for was the back bedroom on the first floor, my parents’ room.
···Knock, knock, knock!
A response came after the knock.
“Son? Come in.”
At my mother’s voice, I opened the door and went inside.
My mother and father, both in pajamas, were sitting on the bed.
My father set down the book he had been reading and looked at me.
And then.
I spoke words I had never once said before I regressed.
“Please help me, Father.”
“······!”