Highway with Green Apples (Kindle Single) (A Short Story)

by Bae Suah

  “We’re not taking the truck, dummy. We brought someone else. It’s more fun if you go, too.”

  Since I am wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt, So-yeong covers me up with a big white cotton coat and takes me outside. Sleet is coming down, and it’s very cold. Making my way carefully down the path, I see an unfamiliar car waiting at the end of the alley. So-yeong’s boyfriend and a guy I don’t know are sitting in the front smoking cigarettes. So-yeong keeps giggling as if something is funny. She tells Hyeong-jun, “She didn’t want to come, so I had to drag her out.” The car takes off quickly, even before the hem of my large coat is fully inside. Since Hyeong-jun is just a college student working at his brother’s gas station and doesn’t have the means to buy an imported car, I assume the new-looking Sable belongs to the driver. The wind pushes the sleet into piles along the side of the road. In the backseat, So-yeong has her arms wrapped around Hyeong-jun’s neck. A gold bracelet he gave her sparkles on her wrist. He seems angry with her for some reason. Her cheerful laughter has no effect on him, and only the driver responds to her exaggerated chatter. Looking back on it now, she might have been a little drunk. “Where are we going? Isn’t this the freeway?” she asks the driver. I stare hard out the window at the snowy darkness but can’t tell where we are going.

  So-yeong rolls the window down and sticks her head out into the snow.

  “This road goes to Gugi-dong,” she says. “You’re not thinking of going into the mountains at this time of night, are you?”

  “Why not? Is there any reason we can’t hike to a mountain stream on a snowy winter night?”

  Hyeong-jun unwraps So-yeong’s arms from around his neck; he doesn’t sound like his usual friendly self. So-yeong looks deflated.

  “Remember that tall guy, Kim San-gyeong?” the driver says. “I told him we would meet him in Gugi-dong. He promised me a drink.” Then he addresses me for the first time since I got in the car. “Is that okay?”

  I nod, thinking I will be cold in just my short-sleeved T-shirt and cotton coat. So-yeong pouts and slouches down in her seat. The car seems to swim through the snow, which swirls in the wind, coming down like something in a painting. The driver keeps going, only the round yellow headlights of oncoming cars visible in the dark.

  No one is waiting for us in Gugi-dong. It’s the middle of the night and cold and snowing, so of course the trailhead is deserted.

  When we get out of the car, the driver introduces himself to me.

  “My name is Kim Shin-o,” he says. “Does everyone want some coffee? There’s a vending machine. Let’s go.”

  He takes me with him to get coffee. The wind is quiet, and I can hear water trickling somewhere. It’s too dark to see anything.

  “The machine is down there, at the end,” he says. He points to the other side of the road, which is lined with darkened shops. “So-yeong and Hyeong-jun were fighting the whole way to your place. She said you two used to live together. I think something’s wrong with her. Hyeong-jun is quiet and doesn’t talk much, but she’s erratic and boy crazy.”

  “I thought that’s why Hyeong-jun liked her in the first place,” I say.

  “Yeah, I suppose.” He brushes the snow off his shoulders and empties his pockets of coins.

  “But that’s how it is. Nothing ever ends the way it begins. How could it? She should know that. We went to the same middle school, so I’ve known her for a long time. She has issues. The boys were all crazy about her back then. But each one who tried to date her got tired of her and gave up. That happened too often for it to be the guys’ faults. But you…”

  He pauses to look at me in the light of the vending machine.

  “I heard you two are close, but you seem different. You’re not like her other friends, either. You work in a department store, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I heard you have a boyfriend.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What does he do?”

  “Nothing special. He works at a bank.” I don’t tell him that we just broke up.

  “Now you ask me something. That’s only fair.”

  “Do you have a girlfriend?”

  “Yes, she’s a year older than me. She goes to modeling school.”

  “Why didn’t she come tonight?”

  “She works the night shift at a convenience store.”

  “How long have you been dating?”

  “Around six months.”

  “What kind of things do you fight about?”

  “Hmm. I guess we fight about things like showing up late for dates, her borrowing my credit card and buying a suit from Anne Klein, or me staying out all night drinking with another girl. Nothing serious.”

  He lifts the paper cup and smiles, his white teeth visible in the dark. We see the headlights of another car coming up the mountain.

  “That’s San-gyeong. He said he was bringing his new girlfriend.” He gulps down his coffee. “San-gyeong’s a great guy. He loves places like this. Like forest trails on a winter night. He likes going places where no one else would think of going. He’s a cool guy.”

  The guy named San-gyeong is tall and wearing glasses. He looks like he might have been the star player on his high school basketball team. The girl he introduces as his new girlfriend has dyed, bobbed hair and wears boots and earrings, but she looks like a little kid.

  “She’s not in elementary school, is she? Where does he find them so young?” Hyeong-jun whispers to Shin-o.

  Sitting in the backseat with a sad look on her face, So-yeong takes a cup of coffee from Shin-o and mutters to me, “I think Hyeong-jun and I are going to break up. I don’t think he’s in love with me anymore. I should date my boss instead. This is no fun. I’m depressed.”

  So-yeong works as a clerk for a small trading company.

  “Want to go into the forest and have some drinks there?” San-gyeong asks, sticking his head in the car.

  “In this snow? No, not with the girls,” Shin-o objects.

  “Then maybe we can find something closer,” San-gyeong says, “where we can get out of the snow. I brought the alcohol. Isn’t this great? Drinking in the snow?”

  “If we go down to the parking lot, the buildings should give us some cover from the snow. But don’t you think it’ll be too cold?” Hyeong-jun sulks.

  I sip my coffee and think about the fact that if I didn’t have the day off tomorrow, I would tell So-yeong to take me home that instant. The quiet, snowy night reminds me of the story of the Little Match Girl. San-gyeong takes a bottle of Rémy Martin and a stack of paper cups out of the car.

  “What? You dragged us all the way out here in this weather just to drink that?” So-yeong, who’s been keeping quiet, pouts, and Hyeong-jun shrugs as if he’s sick of her and turns his back. I don’t know what San-gyeong’s young girlfriend is so happy about, but she keeps hanging on his arm and giggling.

  Shin-o warns her to keep it down. “People live here,” he says. “We can’t make too much noise.” The parking lot in front of the shuttered stores is empty, and the second floor of the buildings juts out, offering us some shelter. Shin-o finds a stack of newspapers and spreads them out. The snow is constant but turns to rain the moment it touches the asphalt. Up on the road, cars are speeding into a darkened tunnel.

  San-gyeong’s girlfriend reads the racing section of the Sunday sports paper that’s spread out on the ground. She doesn’t seem interested in anyone but San-gyeong. Each time she turns her head, her shiny hair gives off a clean smell like ice just pulled from the freezer. She leans against San-gyeong’s shoulder, plays with his hair, and stares at us in defiance. I’m just here, her eyes say. I’m just here and it’s none of your business. Stay away from me. Don’t even look at me.

  “What’s your name?” Shin-o asks her as he pours the Rémy Martin into the paper cups. Hyeong-jun eats some cold fried chicken he had wrapped in tin foil.

  San-gyeong lights a bundle of the remaining newspapers with his lighter. The dry paper quickly
catches fire. “Ah, that’s warm.”

  So-yeong takes her arm from around Hyeong-jun’s waist and holds her hands up to the flame. Now she really looks like the Little Match Girl. In the light of the burning newsprint, Hyeong-jun and So-yeong’s faces resemble a scene from a movie. Her long hair dips forward. She looks like she’s crying. Behind them, the falling snow is like a movie set.

  San-gyeong’s girlfriend takes the almost full cup of Rémy Martin that Shin-o pours for her and downs it like it’s Coca-Cola. “Autumn,” she says.

  “Your name is Autumn?”

  “Yeah. Kim Autumn.”

  “I guess your little sister must be named Spring.”

  “I don’t have a little sister.”

  “Are you in middle school?”

  “What’re you talking about? I’ll be done with high school in another year.”

  The newspaper burns all the way down. Dark ash blows around on the wind and dirties the clean-swept pavement in front of the ski shop. At ten in the morning, the first of the white-shirted employees to arrive will grumble, wet a mop, and come out to clean it up. He’ll sweep up the color ads and torn racing pages of the Sunday paper and throw away the empty Rémy Martin bottle and crumpled paper cups full of cigarette butts.

  So-yeong buries her head in her arms. San-gyeong gets cans of beer from the car. So-yeong seems drunk, so I drink the rest of the Rémy Martin in her cup. San-gyeong and Hyeong-jun talked about the horse races they went to last Sunday.

  “It was amazing,” Hyeong-jun says excitedly.

  “Yeah,” San-gyeong agrees, “Hundred and fifty to one. But mine came in last.” Shin-o offers Autumn another beer. She taps her feet and hums an old Engelbert Humperdinck song: Please release me, let me go. So-yeong’s tears fall onto her arms.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way,” So-yeong whispers. “It isn’t Hyeong-jun’s fault. He doesn’t mean anything to me anymore. He doesn’t make me sad, but he doesn’t make me happy, either. That’s how it started, and that’s how it’ll end.”

  I didn’t make Hyeong-jun sad or happy, either. But it also didn’t occur to me to tell him, “Let’s stop seeing each other. I can’t do this anymore. Not like this,” when I was pulling on my stockings in the window of a hotel room overlooking the banks of a river wet with dew. Instead, I said, “I’m lonely, and it hurts.” I told him, “I wanted so badly to be smothered with love that I thought I would go crazy.”

  “When was that?” he asked, while knotting his tie.

  “When I was six.”

  “Were you precocious? Or just pathetic?”

  “Both, probably.”

  “I wanted to have sex so badly, I thought I would go crazy.”

  “When was that?”

  “Second year of high school.”

  I stared at the back of his white dress shirt. The smell of wet grass in the morning drifted in through the open window. The fog was slowly lifting from the highway that led back to Seoul. He slipped on his shoes with one hand and fumbled with the other for the pack of cigarettes on the table littered with half-drunk glasses of flat beer, lipstick-stained cigarette butts, and crumpled napkins and put it in his pocket. The high school sophomore who thought he’d go crazy from lack of sex and the six-year-old girl who’d suffered from a terminal lack of affection walked hand in hand out of the hotel.

  Shin-o asks me to go with him to buy more beer.

  “We drank everything San-gyeong brought. There’s a convenience store a block that way. We can get something to eat, too.”

  I borrow So-yeong’s scarf and tie it around my head, then stick my hands in my coat pockets and walk beside Shin-o. Past a shuttered fast-food restaurant, a shop that sells pottery fired on-site in gas kilns, and a golf shop, we see the lights of the convenience store. The employee is setting a large, black plastic trash bag on the curb. The snow is still falling, but everything looks damp and dreary. If anyone were to wake up at that moment and glance out their window to see the two of us walking down the street, they wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep and would have to have a smoke.

  “Do you have a cigarette?” I hold out my hand to Shin-o.

  “Here you go.” Shin-o lights up a cigarette, takes a drag, and passes it to me. I stop in the street to smoke. The snow is slowly turning to rain.

  “If the two of them break up,” Shin-o says, “I might never see So-yeong again. In fact, I’m sure of it.”

  He pulls his jacket collar up around his neck and stuffs his hands into his jean pockets.

  “Why not? You went to school together.”

  “Yes, but we weren’t that close. Hyeong-jun’s my friend, and she’s his girlfriend. That’s it. He’s been tired of her for a while now. Lately they fight every time they see each other.”

  Shin-o lights another cigarette. In the headlights of an oncoming car, his profile is silhouetted like a black-and-white movie poster.

  “Were you ever interested in her?” I ask.

  “Briefly, in middle school. Everyone liked her back then.”

  It feels good to stand on a wet street late at night in a white cotton coat and smoke a cigarette while looking at the lights of a convenience store across the street. If only I could shake this anxiety about the fact that winter is coming. I can’t spend the rest of my life thinking only about seaside bungalows and fruit cocktail with sand in it and sunlight reflecting off of sunglasses.

  “It was just a crush. By the way, I thought So-yeong was the one who needed a drink, but it looked like you were drinking more than her,” Shin-o says as we enter the convenience store.

  We buy several cans of beer, smoked dried squid, potato chips, and warm canned coffee. The cashier has the radio turned on low to keep himself awake. “Ne Me Quitte Pas” is playing.

  I listen as Shin-o whistles along to the song and then ask him, “If your girlfriend works the night shift, when do you get to see each other?”

  “Oh, I’ll see her in five hours. I said I’d give her a ride home.” He checks his watch. “She likes it when I drive her home. Even though it’s only two subway stops away. We usually stop on the way for a bowl of haejangguk, or listen to music in the car, or have a smoke together.”

  “I don’t know if it’s a good idea for a girl to work at night. Didn’t you say she wants to be a model? She must complain that it’s bad for her skin.”

  “Of course she complains. She took the job thinking it was only temporary. But I don’t think she has what it takes to be a model. She’ll be lucky if she can get the occasional catalog job. Basically, she’s not that pretty. Also, she’s not the type to work hard at it.”

  “Is the Sable yours?”

  “No,” he says and frowns. “The truth is I work at a repair shop. I’m just a regular employee. My girlfriend thinks my dad’s the owner and I own several cars, but it’s not true. That car belongs to a customer. It’s not mine. What kind of grease monkey owns a Sable? That’s ridiculous.”

  “But, wait. Are you allowed to take their cars out of the shop?”

  “I have to take it right back after I drop her off. Otherwise, it’ll be reported as stolen.”

  “Why didn’t you just tell her the truth?”

  “San-gyeong set us up. He said it just slipped out when he was telling her about me. I didn’t think it would matter, so I didn’t say anything. But I’m not going to be a grease monkey forever. Absolutely not.”

  The second time I saw him, he told me, “I’m just an ordinary bank employee,” while knotting his tie. It was that hour of the morning when manual laborers began swarming the market streets in search of a drink to chase their hangovers. From between the half-open curtains, I saw the bright, wide street filled with a procession of bicycles headed for the morning shift at a factory. Was this really the same Seoul? I had marveled over it for a moment.

  “When I was in high school,” he said, “I wanted to be a rock and roll singer, but it didn’t go anywhere. I never once joined in any protests or demonstrations in colle
ge. But my mom still favors me. I have two older brothers, but she lets me do whatever I want, and she still calls me her baby.”

  I had washed my hair and was putting on eye shadow and lipstick. I still had plenty of time before I had to go to work. This man who was so interested in me even though we’d only met twice felt like a stranger to me.

  “Tell me about yourself,” he said as he started the car. “Tell me what you like, what you want to do.”

  “I like having a cigarette and a cup of coffee in the morning. And I like watching the rain through a big plate-glass window.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Yes, that’s all.”

  “What about what you want to do in the future?”

  “Oh, that?” I stared resentfully at Wonhyo Bridge, which was getting backed up with the start of rush hour. “I don’t think about the future. You said you don’t, either. All I think about is death.”

  “Are you listening to me?” Shin-o taps me lightly on the arm.

  “Huh, what did you say? The headlights are so bright, they’re distracting.”

  “I heard you like to draw. So-yeong told me. So you want to become an artist?”

  “I’m a complete amateur. I wanted to go to art school but couldn’t, so now I’m just doing it as a hobby.”

  In the parking lot, San-gyeong and Hyeong-jun are burning newspapers like a pair of hobos. So-yeong has cheered back up and is giggling with Autumn. So-yeong’s pale arms rest on Hyeong-jun’s shoulder like a phantom. Her gold bracelet sparkles in the light of the flames. I don’t think about the future. All I think about is death. Did I really say that to him?

  My cousin starts dropping by the department store to chat, claiming that she’s only there to pick up an Arpeggione Sonata CD or a pink cotton bathrobe to wear after a bath. Sometimes she comes by when I’m getting off work, and we go out for steak. So-yeong shows up, too, sometimes. After she breaks up with Hyeong-jun, she starts wearing a red suit and high heels with her hair pulled into an updo, and I almost don’t recognize her. So-yeong says my cousin is the type of woman who will plunk her baby down in front of Sesame Street as soon as it’s born. Maybe, I say. But So-yeong has also stopped wearing torn blue jeans like a back-alley hippie. What’s more, she tells me that she’s started getting regular facials.