“Pigs’ house,” is what Miss Kwon called it as she’d led us into the Itaewon Market. We moved through abandoned stalls laden with freshly fallen snow and then beneath canvas overhangs to a tightly packed grouping of wooden counters. We crawled beneath the counters and then through a low wooden door and entered a manmade tunnel that twisted twice before ending in this vile enclosure. The place reeked of flesh and a sheen of ice covered the cement, as if it had been thoroughly washed as the freeze set in.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out that this is where the butchers kept their hogs. Outside was a contraption hanging on a crossed wooden peg that looked like a medieval torture device but I knew what it was used for. To hang the hogs by their hind legs while the butcher slit their throats and allowed the blood to drain into a cement sump. I’d walked past here early in the morning on more than one occasion and heard the screams. At first I’d thought the sound was human. And then I realized that it was the last anguished cries of a pig being slaughtered.
Five minutes after our arrival, footsteps approached in our wake. Snow had been falling steadily so it was unlikely that whoever was outside had seen any traces of our arrival. We sat motionless, breathing as little as possible.
The footsteps searched through the market area, paused for a moment, and then two men started chatting in low tones. I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Someone lit a cigarette. Then more footsteps as they moved on. We sat for another half hour in the cold, dank slaughterhouse.
No one approached.
Miss Kwon had somehow come up with a single short candle which she lit and stuck in the middle of the floor of this porcine abattoir. Even that tiny amount of heat brought to life the stale odor of pork flesh. It hovered around us, poking fat fingers into twitching nostrils, causing us to cough and wave our hands, as if chasing away the last vestiges of an evil cloud. Then she and Doc Yong left the enclosure.
“Miss Kwon,” Cort said, “was one of the orphans. She was brought from Itaewon by the nuns while she was still an infant. On the trip she developed a fever and they thought she would die. Somehow, she pulled through. We’ve always been proud of her for that. We always knew she was a survivor.”
“‘We?’” I asked.
“I joined the temple a few months after the Itaewon Massacre. I sometimes helped take care of the kids and grew to love them.”
“I thought Buddhist’s weren’t supposed to love people,” I said.
“It’s difficult,” Cort replied. “Love ties us to this world, making it harder for us to eliminate desire. But it’s a powerful force. We try to understand it and thereby, ultimately, conquer it.”
The two women reentered the pen. They’d been to find a place to pee.
“How’d you find this hiding place?” I asked Miss Kwon.
She lay down her crutch and squatted awkwardly, keeping her injured leg straight out in front of her.
“Find up,” she replied. “Before I work this kind work.”
I glanced at Cort.
“During the years after the war,” he said, “the nuns were short of money, like everybody. They sent some of the kids to live with foster families. Temporarily for most of them but some of them stayed, especially if the family needed them to work. From the time she was a little girl Miss Kwon was a hard worker. She stayed with a family of butchers. Over time, they became her real family at least emotionally.”
These were the people who’d recently told Miss Kwon that they couldn’t take her back because they couldn’t afford to support her, that she must return to Itaewon and continue to earn money as a hostess in the King Club.
“They aren’t Buddhists, right?” I asked “Because they’re butchers.”
Cort shrugged. “Maybe they are. Probably they are. Not everybody can follow the teachings exactly. People have to live.”
Ernie was restless. He crawled outside through the tunnel and returned when he heard noises.
“They already searched the market,” he said, “but not thoroughly. They’ll be back.”
“Not for hours,” Cort said. “By then the sun will be up.”
We slept as best as we could, on the cold bloody slab.
Maybe an hour later, I awoke with the hot gritty odor of smoke shoving up my nostrils. I was dreaming of a barbecue in East L.A., after someone had slaughtered a goat. But then I realized that the smoke was real and it was all around me.
“Fire!” I shouted, reaching in the darkness for Doc Yong. At first my open palms slapped only flat cement. But then I hit a shoe and then a shoulder.
Doc Yong sat up.
“Fire. We have to get out of here.”
She grabbed Miss Kwon. The three of us started crawling. I wasn’t quite sure where Ernie and Cort were. A wall of smoke floated between us and the other side of the abattoir. The tunnel heading toward the back of the butcher shop, away from the counter facing the center of the Itaewon Market, was closer. On all fours, I led the way. Light was no longer a problem. Off to our left, the wooden stand next to the butcher shop was fully ablaze, casting rays of quivering brightness through cracks in the woodwork. I had almost reached the end of the tunnel when a wall of fire, like a flaming blanket, stopped us. I recoiled from the heat. Doc Yong bumped into me.
“What is it, Geogi?” she asked.
“Canvas,” I said. “It fell from the roof and it’s about to set these wooden walls on fire.”
I crawled forward as fast as I could, doing my best to ignore the heat. When I was as close to the burning canvas as I could stand, I turned over, flopped on my butt, and crawled forward feet first, kicking at the burning material. The wooden walls of the tunnel were beginning to smoke now.
“Hurry!” Doc Yong said.
I kicked at the canvas, it bounced away from the soles of my shoes, but then flopped back into place, still blocking our way. I had to have something with which to push it out of our way.
I studied the smoking walls surrounding me. One of the support struts was made of dried wood with a few rusty nails holding it loosely in place. I grabbed it and yanked. It didn’t budge. Doc Yong tried to pull at the top of the strip of wood while I worked at the center. Still it didn’t move. Miss Kwon cowered, her eyes wide. I saw no other likely loose struts of wood.
Her face streaming with perspiration, Doc Yong reached past me and frantically pulled the strut toward her. I pushed her out of the way. This time I pulled steadily, applying pressure with my foot as I heaved and then ancient metal nails groaned, started to slip, and then released violently.
I wrenched the strut away from the last nail holding it and turning my face away from the heat, I poked the canvas up from the ground a couple of feet,
“Crawl through,” I shouted.
The world around us was not only growing brighter with flame but hotter. Breathing was increasingly difficult as clouds of smoke enveloped us. They both crawled forward, Doc Yong first. Laying flat on her face, she wriggled beneath the burning canvas and beyond it and then Miss Kwon, still holding on to her crutch with her right hand, crawled about halfway through. She paused, exhausted, and just as I was about to reach for her, from the other side of the flames, someone pulled and Miss Kwon’s good foot kicked forward and then she was out.
I slid back, away from the burning canvas. I gazed behind me back down the tunnel. Just smoke. It was not possible to go back for Ernie and Cort now. They’d either escaped to the other side or they’d already been overcome by the heat and smoke. I shoved at the flaming material with the stick, and holding it up as high as I could, I crawled under. About halfway through the flaming canvas fell onto my back. I wriggled forward as fast as I could and then I was out and Doc Yong was beating my back with her hands as sparks singed and sputtered against my flesh.
“Come on!” she shouted.
We stood in the center of a wooden warehouse, large enough to hold about four trucks abreast. The walls surrounding us were completely enveloped in flame. Miss Kwon waited near the big double door where, on a normal day, delivery trucks would back in.
I wondered why she didn’t open the door and then I realized that it was held shut by a rusty hasp secured by a heavy duty padlock.
Doc Yong grabbed the padlock and pulled, accomplishing nothing, except making the heavy wooden door
