Necessary Roughness (2 page)

After we left the mountains behind, the ride flattened out. I almost preferred being in a state of panic. Now I had nothing to do except sit and think about how much I missed my friends, my soccer team, our old hangouts. You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.

“You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”
That’s what Sujin had said to me the night before we left. I know it’s corny, but for this situation, it’s applicable. Sujin was always into prepackaged words. Her other favorite line was, “If you love something, set it free”—and blah-blah-blah. I can’t remember the rest. I think she got them off posters in card stores.

Sujin is—was—my girlfriend. She was also Young’s best friend, so I didn’t have to sneak around to see her. A lot of Korean parents are strict, but not as bad as Abogee. He’d decreed dating totally off-limits until college. Who is he kidding?

Even though I got to
see
Sujin a lot, our dating possibilities were pretty limited. For just the two of us, there were no movies, no neighborhood restaurants—no places to just hang out The Korean CIA—which consisted of anyone’s nosy parents, grandparents, and
bratty younger brothers and sisters—might see us and report to Abogee. We had been going out a record two and a half months, but that meant five dates, tops.

What I liked best about her, I think, was her hair. While most of the girls we knew wore theirs long and straight or in these poodley perms, she wore hers short and shaggy. It was a mess, and it looked great on her. I liked her a lot, I have to say, and I think she liked me a lot too. Who knows what would have happened between us? I’ll never know.

There’s so much I’ll never know. Like, if I would have been the star wing on the Alameda County soccer team this year. Manuel had introduced me to the team, a bunch of guys who’d started out playing in the garbage-strewn park by us but were now climbing up in the city ranking.

Abogee almost didn’t let me play soccer. He thought it’d take too much time away from my studying and it wasn’t something smart college-bound Korean boys did, only dumb wetback Latinos who ended up working in Korean stores for peanuts. You can see why Abogee and I don’t always see eye to eye.

Lucky for me there were two Chinese guys on the team, Calvin and Curtis Tom. Calvin ended up going to
Yale.
I told Abogee he’d gone there on a soccer scholarship, although I wasn’t sure if that was the case.

I almost didn’t go to my last practice, because I was so busy packing and I was afraid it would make me too sad. But then I decided I owed it to Manuel and the team, so I went.

I was flying, at that last one. I played as hard as I had the day I tried out. By the time we quit and flopped on the ground, my blood was taking an express trip around my body, my lungs were gasping for air, and I knew I would probably never feel as happy in my whole life as I did at that moment.

Yeah.

I remember how the guys looked when Manuel told them I’d be leaving. And then how he surprised me.

A red-and-gold jersey,
ALAMEDA EAGLES.
Number eleven. It was beautiful.

“No one on the team will ever wear number eleven. It is always the number of our compadre Chan,
claro?”

“Claro.”
I ran up to Manuel and grabbed him in a bone-crunching hug. He smelled like sweat and chilies.

Then I basically ran the whole way home because I just couldn’t stay there anymore.

I never knew there was so much wide-open space in the U.S. of A. The ribbon of highway cuts into a lot of nothing—no houses, no people, no things—all through Montana. It makes you feel like you’re in an arcade game, where you’re not really moving, but scenery is just passing you by: telephone poles, humps of dry grass, trees.

When we crossed into North Dakota, the nothing got even worse. We hardly saw other cars, not to mention trees, only never-ending telephone lines. A couple of times Lou strayed into the other lane, as if he were pulled by a magnet. Luckily, as I said, there were no other cars.

By the time we left Bismarck, I was ready to scream.

“We’re almost there,” O-Ma said. For the last few hours, the only sounds in the car had been the
plop
of fat raindrops and the
squee-squonk
of the cracked rubber wipers. We were still hours away from Minnesota.

*  *  *

WELCOME TO MINNESOTA, LAND OF TEN THOUSAND LAKES

“Land of Ten Thousand Hicks, I’ll bet,” I muttered to Young as the car crossed some unseen dotted line. “Land of Ten Thousand Hillbillies.”

“I hope they have a good orchestra in Iron River,” Young said, and I knew she was tired too; this was the closest she ever came to complaining.

“Want to wear my Walkman for a while?”

“Thanks, Oppa,” she said, using the Korean word for older brother (I was born first). I liked it when she did that. I would call her
yohdongseng
—little sister—but it has too many syllables and I’m lazy. She shook out my Green Day tape and put in Mozart.

I watched the scenery for about the hundred thousandth time. Driving here was a huge connect-the-dots game: we hit one town, drove down a narrow highway, hit another. It wasn’t anything like L.A., where you drove a couple hours to Redondo Beach on any of a zillion multilane freeways and you still never felt like you’d left the city.

I knew we were getting close when we began to see these “Adopt-a-Highway” signs that said “sponsored by Iron River such-and-such.” I’m not sure how you adopt a highway—feed it, put it through college?—but I noted signs for the Iron River Rotary Club, First Lutheran Church of Iron River, Troop 17 of the Iron River Boy Scouts, the Bob (Bonnie) Gunderson family.

It was so flat around there that long before we got to town, we could see this big metal water tower sticking up. After we passed the sign
IRON RIVER
(POP. 7,735)
, we could see that the tower said in fading letters
HOME OF THE MINERS/STATE FOOTBALL CHAMPS
. That was the biggest thing that happened in this town in ten years. Totally lame.

O-Ma was busy studying the directions Bong had given, and she came to the conclusion that they were incomprehensible. Abogee pulled over to the side of the road, grumbling, but I saw that he was squinting at the Korean writing too. He finally steered Lou down the one street that went through town, and soon we saw a cracked sign that said
IRONGATE APARTMENTS,
where Bong had arranged for us to rent his old place.

Abogee shut off the car and got out. He did a few stretching exercises; I could see half-moons of sweat underneath his arms.

I was wondering why he was standing in the rain, but far be it that I should say anything.

Abogee buttoned the top buttons of his shirt, tucked the tails into his pants, cleared his throat, and farted. Young and I rolled our eyes at each other. No matter how many times we tell him that farting out loud is considered gross, he just starts in with this “If we were in Korea” bit. Let me tell you, if half his “if we were in Korea” stories are true, I don’t think I’d ever want to go there.

“Chan, you come with me,”
he said in Korean, the very first words he’d spoken to me since we’d left.

I looked up at him. What did he need
me
for?

“Hurry! You heard me.”

I clambered out of Lou. My shirt was plastered to my back. I tented it out and shook it.

We went together through a door marked
OFFICE
and found ourselves in a tiny, dark room. No one was there, so we sat down on chairs next to a dusty plastic fern and a wall calendar that said
COMPLIMENTS OF YOUR INSURANCE AGENT, JOE NYGAARD
.

The door swung open and a man lumbered in.

“Can I help you?” He was fat and bald and eying us suspiciously.

Abogee rose with a smile and extended his hand.

“I Bong Kim brudder,” he said.

The man looked at the hand, but made no move to shake it. Finally Abogee took it back.

The man had beads of sweat on his upper lip; it looked the way water beads up on your car when you use Turtle Wax. I imagined him Turtle Waxing his lip, and I suddenly snorted.

“What’s so funny?” the man said. Abogee glared at me. I coughed.

“I Bong Kim brudder,” Abogee said again, a little more loudly.

“I can’t understand a freakin’ word you said.” The
man turned to me. “Hey, kid, he not speak English or something?”

“Of course he does!” I said. What a jerk.

Abogee put his hand on my arm and squeezed—hard enough to make it hurt.
“I didn’t give you permission to speak,”
he said.

I shut up, surprised.

“Mister,” Abogee said, smiling again. “I try to tell you, I Bong Kim brud-der. You know, Bong-Ho Kim live here?”

The man squinted at Abogee. His bald head seemed to grow shinier and his cheeks puffed like Alien was going to come out of them.

“So you here to pay the money?” he growled. “The money, you know? Moolah, bread, dinero?”

“Yes, yes,” Abogee said, grinning and nodding. “I pay rent.”

Through the window I could see the car. Young in the back, O-Ma in the front. Both motionless as statues.

“So, where is it?” The man leaned his two hammy arms on the desk.

“Want to see room, first,” Abogee said, smiling a little less.

“Uh-uh,” he said. “Your brother left us without a trace—including the two months’ rent he owes me.”

It suddenly dawned on me what Bong had done.
“Uh, Abogee,” I said. He shook his head violently and turned away from me.

“How much rent?” Abogee asked.

The man dug in a file cabinet and pulled out a sheet, while mumbling to himself, “I can’t believe I let him slide. He kept saying he was gettin’ money from Korea. In just a little while, please mister, just hold off a little while. Yah, right.

“Seven … hundred … fifty … dollars plus two … hundred in key money.” He pronounced each digit slowly, one at a time. Abogee seemed to catch them slowly too, one at a time.

Abogee reached into a pocket and pulled out a fat envelope. He counted out nine hundred-dollar bills and a fifty.

“Abogee,” I said. He gave me a warning look.

I had to do something, but I didn’t know what.

“Abogee, that’s Bong’s rent money,”
I blurted in Korean.

Abogee’s lips tightened.

“Quiet!”
he hissed. He handed the bills to the man.

“Now, you show us room, yes?” Abogee said.

The man turned to me. “What the hell is he talking about?”

“We need to rent a place,” I muttered. I let my hair fall in front of my face, as if that would shield me from what was going on.

“Hell, no!” he bellowed. “I ain’t renting to no more
sneaks. I got what’s owed and I ain’t making the same mistake twice. You two better go before I get
really
mad.” He made stabbing gestures at the door.

“What’s going on?”
Abogee asked.
“Why is he so mad? Did you insult him?”

“He doesn’t have any rooms,”
I explained lamely.
“He can’t rent to us.”

“What? I just gave him almost a thousand dollars.’”

“That was for rent Bong owed. I was trying to tell you.”

“I’m gonna count to ten.” The man narrowed his eyes.

“One.”

“Abogee, we’d better go.”
I put a hand on his elbow. He pulled away.

“Mister, what going on here?” he said. “Why no rent to us? I wanna my money back.”

“Two. Three …”

“I no leave until I get money back.” Abogee sat back down on the chair, all one hundred pounds of him.

“Seven. Eight. Nine …”

I had a sensation of being lifted and then being forced to walk on my tippy-toes out the door. I felt a shove in my back and went flying. Luckily I had time to turn around and catch Abogee on the rebound, as he bounced off a shrub.

“And stay out, chinks!” the guy yelled, before going back into the office. The lock clicked behind him.

The Hell Motel was the one motel in town. It was actually the Hello Motel, but the
O
on the neon sign was flickering, almost out. We were the only people there except for the office lady, who looked like she was over a hundred years old.

She gave us a key and we went into the room, which I bet hadn’t been opened for several centuries.

At least the shower worked. I felt a thousand times better after standing in there and letting the hot water beat on my back. I was a little leery of the stained, scratchy-looking towels, so I just let myself drip-dry for a bit before changing back into my clothes.

When I came out, O-Ma and Abogee were facing each other but not speaking. Young was sitting a little off to the side, on some lumpy thing that was supposed to be a couch, so I joined her.

“We have to find a place immediately,”
Abogee informed O-Ma.
“We don’t have the money to stay in hotels like this.”

“You shouldn’t have given the money to that man,”
O-Ma said.
“We can’t keep covering for Bong’s irresponsible debts.”
Her voice was soft, but it seemed to slice through the gloom.

There is something about parents fighting. It’s unwatchable. Young must have been thinking the same thing, because she switched on the TV. We stared at the flickering tube as if our lives depended on it.
“It is my duty to help my brother,”
I heard Abogee say.

“Then why don’t you just send all of our money to your brother, so he can continue to waste it?”
O-Ma’s voice ratcheted tighter.

Young stiffened beside me. On the screen, someone was getting blown up.

“You, you
—
shut up!”

Young and I whirled around and stared at Abogee. His eyes were wild, and for a horrible moment I thought he was going to hit O-Ma. When his hand moved, Young sucked in her breath.

At the sound, O-Ma and Abogee turned to look at us, like they’d forgotten we were there.

Abogee’s face froze, then began to collapse the slightest bit, like ice cream about to slide off a cone. But then he pulled his old face back on so fast, I couldn’t exactly be sure what I had seen.