CHAPTER 24-3
499 Words
In the alley outside the American restaurant, the aroma wasn’t quite as nauseating as in the main thoroughfare. It looked like Jae would be feasting on old vegetables and stale dinner rolls tonight. It was no worse than the way he was used to eating back in Chongsong.
The money he stole from the captain had lasted long enough to bring him to Yanji. It had taken Jae two weeks to make the journey, but sources he met on his search for the broker all eventually pointed here. Jae still didn’t know which brothel to visit first, and he couldn’t exactly afford soliciting door to door. Even now, he just barely had the bribe money he’d need to cross the border and return to North Korea, but that didn’t matter. All he cared about was finding Sun. His hunt had brought him as far as Yanji. He only hoped his luck would last long enough to reach his sister before he went completely broke.
Jae gnawed on a discarded bone. The sauce was sweet and made his throat even more parched. Yanji was a filthy city, with its outdoor garbage heaps stinking up the air, bright lights polluting the night sky, and half-clad women parading like gaggles of geese. It was getting late, and with each passing hour, the costumes of the girls passing back and forth grew more and more ridiculous. Jae clenched his jaw and resolved to find Sun even if he had to eat trash in the alleyway for a year.
He didn’t look up when an old man squatted down next to him and poked through the garbage with a stick. Jae almost gagged at the scent of human waste mixed with cheap beer. “Gimme your bone, boy.” The man pointed to the leftovers in Jae’s lap.
Jae found no reason to hide his disdain. “If you had teeth enough in your mouth to chew, granddad, I’d consider it.”
The old man chortled, revealing two yellowing incisors. “Where I comes from, boy, a kid gots respect for his elders.” The man’s words were slurred, from drink or from his toothless gums, or maybe both.
Where I come from, old men like you are the first to starve. Jae left the thought unsaid and tossed the ancient beggar one of the bones.
“The others, too.”
Jae ignored him. The man reached out, but Jae slapped his hand away. “Watch it, granddad.” Jae turned his back and picked more at his dinner.
The old man sniggered again. “You gots to watch yourself, river hopper.”
Jae set his jaw. He wouldn’t be baited. Koreans swarmed all over Yanji, outnumbering even the ethnic Chinese. There was no way a half-blind hobo could prove Jae was from across the border. The old man poked at the trash pile one last time. “Something I say upset you, then, did it?” he wheezed. “Just hold on to that temper of yours, or it might gets you in trouble, river boy.”
The old man’s gummy smile took away all that remained of Jae’s appetite.
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- Writer
