A Cab Called Reliable

by Patti Kim

  He drove between the parked vans and trucks and stopped in front of Sol Sanders & Sons. He turned off the ignition, pulled the parking brake, tossed his sunglasses on the dashboard, opened his door, spat out some phlegm, said, “Stay here,” and shut the door. I watched his short figure walk toward the heavy plastic strips that hung as drapes at the entrance of the store. He flung them back. He faded in with the voices of Mr. Sanders and his sons.

  I leaned my back against the door, straightened out my legs onto the driver’s seat, and hung my head outside. I told him to check all the potatoes for eyes before he buys the entire bag. Eyes made the potato a pain to peel.

  The sun felt hot on my forehead and nose. One of the four men near the door was finishing a bag of potato chips. He shook the remains into his opened mouth and crumpled up the bag. I tasted the salt in my own mouth and felt thirsty for the man.

  A heavy African woman wearing a bright yellow and brown dress with an African print stood behind a table of stacked tapes between two huge, silent speakers. She shaded her eyes from the sun, looked my way, and waved her hand for me to come and buy her tapes. But I closed my eyes. Her figure was dancing to African voodoo music in my mind. As the oppressive drumbeats quickened, she pranced around a fire that gradually died down. And as the fire gradually died down, her dress transformed into a red and green hanbok, her head now covered in white cloth, and with her long white sleeves she spun fluttering rings. The deep drumbeats changed into the sound of clanging cymbals, and the woman swayed in the center of the busy marketplace in the village of the One Hundred-Year-Old Mountain, where a fishmonger, basket weaver, and kelp seller’s loud bargaining with customers competed with the shaman’s chanting.

  From the back of the truck, my father called, “Joo-yah!” I saw him signal with his right hand for me to come around, unload the cart, and help him load the bed of his truck.

  A crate of Twin Shields collard greens, a sack of Kings potatoes, and a sack of Sylvany Spanish onions.

  “Did you check to see if the potatoes had eyes?” I asked.

  “They got no eyes,” he said.

  “Did you check to see if they were rotten? Remember the last time? Some of them were purple, bruised up.”

  “Guh reh. Guh reh.”

  “Did you get the biggest onions? You know how hard they are to slice if they’re the size of golf balls. They don’t even stay on the slicing machine.”

  “Guh reh.”

  “Dad, this isn’t a smart idea at all. We should have gotten the vegetables last. They’re probably going to wilt in this weather.”

  “Go inside. Too many words today. You got too many words.”

  I had too many words? He was the one with too many words. And they were all inappropriate ones. I told him not to talk like his customers, damning and hey manning and what you doing with my eggs, little miss, and if you ever thinking about getting married mmm mmm mmm. I told him to refuse the girlie magazines, postcards, and calendars the mechanic next door gave him. Didn’t he remember what they did to Mother? He didn’t have to take them. He could simply say, no thank you, instead of stashing them underneath the cash register and taking a peek at them when the lunch crowd died down. Or stashing the cutouts in the Yellow Pages or the Korean phone directory or between the pages of Yes, You Too Can Speak English, Too.

  Only three words. No—thank—you. No thank you. He had no trouble saying them when I cooked him brown rice with beans instead of the white rice because brown rice was better for one’s digestion and had more nutrients, or when I served him pasta shells with marinara instead of gook soo, lettuce with vinegar and oil instead of kimchi. He wanted red meat so I cooked steak, but he wanted kal bi. No thank you; he said it to me easily.

  My father parked in front of Deck-Bone Cash & Carry, and I said, “Dad, don’t go to Deck-Bone Cash & Carry.”

  “Deck-Bone is cheap,” he said.

  “I know, but they don’t carry everything, which means we’ll have to go to two meat stores today.”

  “Shut up. We go to three today,” he said.

  He should have gone to Meat Time Eat Time instead of Deck-Bone Cash & Carry because Deck-Bone didn’t carry chicken gizzards. Chicken gizzards with gravy over rice, although a little expensive, went over especially well on Thursdays because Thursday was payday for the Navy Yard workers. But my father never listened to me.

  He went ahead, got out of the car, shut the door, put the shopping list in his back pocket, pulled his socks up, walked into Deck-Bone, and looked for his frozen turkey wings, ham hock, and slab of bacon. He was not going to find any chicken gizzards in there.

  Minutes later, my father tapped my window with his knuckles and said, “Come on.” I followed him to the back where a cartload of everything they like to eat was waiting for me to unload. The customers loved Juicy Fruit chewing gum. They loved orange-flavored Nehi and grape-flavored Rock Creek. Salmon cake made of canned mackerel and breadcrumbs. Salt and vinegar and barbeque on everything. Deep-fried pig skin chips and hot potato sticks.

  We finally arrived back at the store, and Father backed the truck to Good Food’s front door. He opened the bars, unbolted the top, middle, and two bottom locks, pulled open the door, and pushed the screen back, hooking the handle on a rusty bent nail. I crawled into the bed of the truck and waited for him to bring the cart so I could load and he could roll the boxes and sacks to the back. But he didn’t come out like he usually did with a smile or a burp or a scratch. He didn’t come out. So I called him three times. When he didn’t answer, I worried, remembering how Angela’s father got stabbed. I climbed out of the truck and looked inside.

  My father was on his hands and knees picking up the quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies that had spilled out of the cash register when the burglars cracked open the drawer. He collected the coins into the King Edward cigar box. The chairs were knocked over onto the middle of the floor. Tables turned.

  Greasy posters of cheeseburgers and french fries hanging by one corner. Cigarette cartons torn and stepped on. Clean napkins scattered on the floor, like they had been thrown up in the air by gloved hands. I could see them having a party in here. One with chunks of ham and roast beef, one with a carton of beer, one with the slicing machine coming in and going out of the hole they had drilled in the middle of our wall underneath our sink next to our steam table in front of the grill. The only things left in the back were opened sacks of cornmeal, mousetraps, and the stink of horse manure from Mr. Selby’s limo service. They were renting out horse, carriage, and rider by the hour because the weather was so pleasant nowadays.

  When a path was finally cleared, I wheeled the cart around from the storage room to the back of the truck. My father was mopping up the eggshells. I loaded the cart with stacked boxes of bottled orange and grape-flavored RC. I rolled the cart to the back. He was still mopping up the eggshells. I unloaded the cart and rolled it back to the truck. Sylvany Spanish onions wheeled to the cooking room; Kings potatoes leaned against the onions; the crate of collard greens in the refrigerator. He picked up the napkins, dusted them on his thigh, and collected them in a pile. I loaded the cart with turkey wings, ham hock, and the slab of bacon. I rolled the cart to the freezer and unloaded. He was taping the greasy posters back up on the wall. I rolled the cart back to the truck, unloaded the boxes of Snickers, Milky Ways, Three Musketeers, M&Ms, and five boxes of Juicy Fruit, the gum they love to chew, and wheeled them to the counter. He was looking into the hole, shaking his balding head, and touching the edges of the circle they made. I wheeled the empty cart to the back storage room and leaned it against the wall underneath the light switch.

  I swept the floors, while he tried to cover up the hole by nailing a piece of plywood over it. I swept the corners, underneath the tables and counters, and around his stooped body. We wouldn’t be able to total up the week’s worth of sales on the cash register. I mopped. I poured Clorox and Ajax into the bucket of hot water, dunked the mop in, and without wringing it, dripped the water ont
o the floor. I scrubbed the corners, underneath the tables and counters, and around his stooped body. I wrung the mop and soaked up the soapy water from the wet floor. The mop slapped.

  I washed and rinsed the four coffeepots, using rags rubber-banded around the tip of a tong. He was still nailing the piece of plywood over the hole. I dried the coffeepots and returned them to the coffeemaker.

  I scraped the week’s worth of grease into the large can that held a month’s worth of grease. I shut it and wobbled out to the alley with it. When I returned, he had finished nailing the piece of plywood over the hole. I rinsed out the toilet bowl. I emptied out the trash. I beat the dust out of the welcome mat.

  My father spoke in Korean. “Ahn Joo-yah, let’s go home.”

  He locked the four bolts and let the door of bars clank shut. It shut, and we heard liquid quickly streaming. When we looked into the alley, there was an old black man peeing next to our can of a month’s worth of grease. When my father quickly turned me around and pushed me toward the truck, I heard the man say he was sorry, but he couldn’t help it, you know how it is. My father said he was sorry and hey man you can finish, take your time. The man zipped up and walked to the end of the alley.

  My father sat on the driver’s seat and fiddled with the gear before starting the ignition. I looked at him and said, “What the hell is his problem? Can’t he find another hole to land his pee?”

  He didn’t answer. He drove over a curb, barely missing the NO PARKING sign that was bent in a forty-five-degree angle.

  “Dad, who does he think he is?” I screamed.

  My father told me to quiet down.

  “It’s bad enough Mr. Selby’s horses shit there, why does he have hang his dick and piss in our alley? I can’t stand this. I can’t stand it. It’s making me sick. It’s bad enough we get robbed, why does he have to add on to our misery and leave his urine in our alley? That’s illegal, do you know that?”

  He opened the glove compartment and took out a napkin to wipe off the sweat beading on his head.

  In Korean he said, “Ahn Joo-yah, please let’s drive home quietly.”

  I wanted to tell him the robbery and the urine were absolute injustices, we were wronged, and the guilty would eventually have to pay their karma debt. All of them. For stabbing Angela’s father, for holding Yoo Jin’s mother at gunpoint underneath the toilet, for shooting off Mr. Hong’s ear for a couple of hundred dollars and a bag of chips, for calling Mrs. Kim a stingy money-hungry chink because she refused to give her customers cleaning for free or because she charged extra for boxed shirts, for making me write badly to save myself from being accused of copying out of a book, for telling me to go back to where I came from (how can I return to my mother’s womb?), for stretching their large, long, curly-lashed eyes at me while singing about my being Chinese and Japanese, for making me want to look, walk, eat, sleep, talk like them, for expecting me to sit quietly in the back of the classroom, for making me repeat my question two or three times because no one could hear my voice squeezed out of a throat that always had clay caught in the center except when it was speaking to Father. When I spoke at Father, my throat opened up and clever words, sentences, paragraphs came to me. It was because I believed I knew better than he.

  He had pushed his socks down to his ankles because the weather was warm, and the vent above the pedals blew air. The vinyl seats were sticking to my thighs. The sun reflected off the side of a high rise made of mirrors that twinkled, blinked, and winked at me as if trying to dazzle me to keep its secrets. We were driving across a bridge over a river. The wind beat in and made noise. But it didn’t keep me from hearing my father’s breathing, which was his pathetic plea: Ahn Joo-yah, Ahn Joo-yah, you have to save your poor father. You are the reason I do this. I cannot do this for long. Study hard, place first in your class, become a doctor or lawyer, take care of me, make money, make my suffering pay off, make my sacrifice worthwhile …

  A man on a ten-speed carrying a blue knapsack on his back pedaled past us as my father slowed down to exit the bridge. As he switched gears, I saw my hand zigzag and tremble next to his, bound at the wrist by steel rings.

  Duty caught me by the throat, keeping me from beating my forehead against the bathroom floor as my mother used to do while she chanted and wailed: Why did you bring me to this awful, awful country?

  13

  It was almost three in the morning, and I was reading about metal knees, plastic hearts, motorized elbows, and electronic ears replacing damaged or missing pieces of the human body, remembering Boris, and thinking of turning the radio on low and slow-dancing with my pillow, when the telephone rang. My father’s oldest brother from Pusan, who had never contacted us since our family immigrated to America, was calling to inform him that their father had passed away from a long-term illness. Something had been terminally wrong with his male organ for years now. To them, the death did not come as a surprise. He lived some years more than they had expected. Everyone here is fine. Are you fine? I’m fine. We’re fine. And my father threw the phone on the floor, returned to his pillow, mumbled something about how unlucky it was to get calls in the middle of the night, and in a matter of seconds, he was snoring again.

  “Daddy, are you all right?” I asked. “Do you want me to get you anything? Anything at all?” My father told me to be quiet and go back to sleep.

  I returned to my room, thinking that my grandfather’s death was a relief for the both of us. He had done enough damage in his lifetime, beating the sanity out of his own daughter, beating and driving my father out of his own country, and stashing his first wife away in some remote village. Who knows how he got rid of his second wife? My father told me that when he visited his mother before leaving for America, she had given him one dried red pepper as a farewell gift, shown him off to the other villagers as her son the doctor in the city, having confused him with her other sons, and offered him dinner while smearing her own feces on walls. My grandfather’s judgment day was long overdue, I told myself as I turned on the radio, took a gentle hold of my pillow, and slow-danced with Ian Krauss, my lab science partner and make-believe boyfriend.

  For Sunday breakfast, I made my father soybean soup with tofu cubes, squash, and mushrooms, and laid a fried egg on top of his rice. Our retired neighbor, Mr. Smith, was mowing his lawn again, the second time this week, and the our-three-sons neighbor had the sprinkler going over their garden with its tomatoes, cucumbers, and daffodils. While waiting for my father to come downstairs for his meal, I looked out of our kitchen window and watched the Korean grandmother hang long strips of nylon gauze to dry on her clothesline.

  Their deck was twice the size of ours. They had a gas grill on which the grandmother cooked croakers and barbecued marinated beef for her daughter-in-law, who was pregnant with her oldest son’s first child. Once, I tried to greet the grandmother, and she asked me in Korean if I was Chinese.

  “I was born in Pusan,” I assured her.

  “Your father’s Chinese, isn’t he? No? Then, your mother, she’s got to be Chinese. One of them has to be Chinese because those eyes, those eyes aren’t Korean eyes. The shape of your face, your hair, even the way you blink. It’s not Korean. Let me ask you something,” she said, squinting her eyes at me. And when she asked me if American girls menstruated, I firmly told her that menstruation was not a matter of race or culture, and ran back home before she could ask me if I had started mine.

  Standing at the bottom of the stairs, I yelled up that the soup was getting cold and the egg on the rice was beginning to freeze. “Hurry up and come down. At this rate, I’ll be making lunch in another hour.”

  I heard the garage door open, followed by the sound of the sliding door of my father’s van. He had woken up early, driven to Good Food for his electric drill, saw, and favorite hammer, and stopped off at a hardware store for two-by-fours, screws, nails, and a twenty-five-foot chain to build a swing set for two in our backyard.

  “There’s no room for this,” I said.

 
; “Oh sure. Plenty of room,” he said, carrying his toolbox to the back.

  “Where? Where’re you going to put it?”

  “I’m going to hang on cherry tree.”

  “Yeah, and break your neck,” I said. “Dad, that’s my favorite tree. Don’t kill it.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m not going to kill, silly girl,” he said, and went back to the van for his two-by-fours.

  “There’s soup on the table.”

  “I eat already,” he said.

  Sound was coming from every part of our street. If not my father’s drilling, hammering, and sawing, then it was the honking cars lined up bumper to bumper on Morning Glory Way trying to find parking for the softball tournaments held at Weston, and the children whose laughter and whining seemed to resonate underneath the heat of the sun, and the lawn mowers that seemed to turn on and off in swift succession. Feeling a little left out, I decided to contribute to the neighborhood noise by vacuuming, running the washer, dryer, and dishwasher, reciting the definition of ten more SAT words, and playing a tune or two on the piano during commercial breaks before running my Sunday evening bath.

  I was trying to curl my hair with a hot iron when my father called me from outside to take a look, to take a ride.

  “Dad, it doesn’t look very stable,” I said, brushing my damp hair behind the kitchen screen door.

  “Oh sure, it’s stable. It’s strong,” he said, as he sat down and swung back and forth. Gripping the chain, he pushed his feet against the grass, and the swing swung higher. “You can try,” he said, waving his free hand and patting the wooden seat where I was to sit next to him.

  I told him it would never hold two people, my hair was still wet, the hot iron was on, and I had to warm up the leftover soup for dinner. As I left him on his swing and returned upstairs, I started to feel the way I had some months ago after freeing the brown rabbit my father had trapped and caged in our backyard. I had found my father in his room with his head down on his desk, listening to an opera, and tried to explain in my best Korean that the poor rabbit was better off free, on its own, with its family, with other rabbits. I asked him how he could possibly watch the poor thing mutilate its own face trying to escape through the bars and wires his hands had built. He told me it wasn’t my rabbit to free. I hadn’t trapped it. I hadn’t fed it carrots and lettuce leaves every morning. I hadn’t cleaned its cage. I hadn’t rubbed ointment on its wounds. He said that when he was a boy, he had taken care of plenty of rabbits in Korea, and he was planning on letting it go once its wounds healed. He said a rabbit in that condition would surely die by the end of the day. He told me to go outside and clean up its mess.