fault, Andrew.’ I was dying of embarrassment for them.”
Bear was on a roll. Reseng opened the warehouse door, half-listening to his rant.
“Which cart?” he asked.
Bear took a look inside and pointed to a hand cart.
“Is it big enough?” Reseng asked.
Bear sized it up and nodded.
“You’re not moving a cow. Where’d you park?”
“Behind the building.”
“Why so far away? And it’s uphill.”
Bear manned the cart. He had an easy, optimistic stride that belied his penchant for grumbling. Reseng envied him. Bear didn’t have a greedy bone in his body. He wasn’t one to run himself into the ground trying to drum up more business. He got by on what he made from his small pet crematorium and had even raised two daughters by himself. His eldest was now at college. “I stick to light meals,” he liked to claim. “To stretch my food bill. I just have to hold out for a few more years, until my girls are on their own.” Bear spooked easily. He never took on anything suspicious, even if he needed the money. And so, in a business where the average life span was ridiculously short, Bear had lasted a long, long time.
Reseng popped open the trunk. Bear tilted his head quizzically at the two black body bags inside.
“Two? Old Raccoon said there’d be only one package.”
“One man, one dog,” Reseng said.
“Is that the dog?” Bear asked, pointing at the smaller of the bags.
“That’s the man. The big one’s the dog.”
“What kind of dog is bigger than a man?”
Bear opened the bag in disbelief. Inside was Santa. His long tongue flopped out of the open zipper.
“Holy shit! Now I’ve seen it all. Why’d you kill the dog? What’d it do, bite your balls?”
“I just thought it was too old to get used to a new master.”
“Well, look at you, meddling with the instructions you were given,” Bear said with a snigger. “You need to watch your step. Don’t get tripped up worrying over some dog.”
Reseng zipped the bag back up and paused. Why had he killed the dog? When he’d gone back to collect the old man’s body, the dog had been quietly standing watch. With his back to the sun, Reseng had looked down at the sunlight spilling into the dog’s cloudy brown eyes. The dog hadn’t growled. It was probably wondering why its master wasn’t moving. Reseng had stared at the dog, which was now too old to learn any new tricks. No one’s left in this quiet, beautiful forest to feed you, he thought. And you’re too old to go bounding through the forest in search of food. Do you understand what I’m saying? The late autumn sun cast its weak rays over the crown of the dog’s head. It had gazed up at him with those cloudy brown eyes as Reseng stroked its neck. Then he had raised his rifle and shot the dog in the head.
“Pretty heavy for an old man,” Bear said as he grabbed one end of the body bag.
“I told you, this one’s the dog,” Reseng grumbled. “That one’s the old man.”
Bear looked back and forth at the bags in confusion.
“This damn dog is heavy.”
After loading the bodies onto the cart, Bear looked around. The pet crematorium was a quiet place at two in the morning. Of course it was. No one would be coming to cremate a pet at this hour.
Bear opened up the gas valve and lit the furnace. The flames rose, peeling the black vinyl bag away from the two bodies like snakeskin being shed. The old man was stretched out flat, with the dog’s head resting on his stomach. As the furnace filled with heat, their sinews tightened and shrank, and the old man’s body began to squirm. It was a sad sight, as if he were still clinging to the world of the living. Was there even anything left for him to cling to? It didn’t matter. It was over. In two hours, he’d be nothing but dust. You can’t cling to anything when you’re dust.
Reseng stared at the contorted body. The old man had been a general. Throughout the three long decades of military rule in South Korea, he had been working behind the scenes, in the shadow of the dictator, drawing up lists of targets and orchestrating their assassinations. How had he pulled it off? It wasn’t easy back then for former members of the North Korean army to succeed in the South Korean army and harder still to earn a spot in the Korean Central Intelligence Agency. But he’d survived. He’d made it through the first dictator’s twenty years of ironfisted rule, the toppling of the regime, the coup d’etat that followed, and the next ten years under a new military regime. He’d survived the political monkey business and the unrelenting suspicion directed at former North Korean soldiers, and became a general. Whenever someone fell into disfavor with the dictator, this general with two shiny stars on his cap would seek out Old Raccoon’s library. He’d hand over the list with the target’s name on it and, most brazenly of all, use the people’s tax money to settle the bill.
But in the end, his own name had made it onto the list. That’s how it went. The good times came to an end sooner or later and, in order to survive, those who found themselves dethroned had to sort out what they’d done and sweep up the scraps. As always, time had a way of circling around and biting you on the ass.
Once, when Reseng was twelve, the old man had come to the library dressed in uniform. It was a fine uniform. The old man came right up to Reseng.
“What’re you reading, boy?”
“Sophocles.”
“Is it fun?”
“I don’t have a dad, so I can’t really understand it.”
“Where’s your dad?”
“In the garbage can in front of the nunnery.”
The general grinned, stars sparkling, and ruffled Reseng’s hair. That was twenty years ago. The little boy remembered that moment, but the old man had probably forgotten.
Reseng took out a cigarette. Bear lit it for him, took out one of his own, and started whistling birdcalls through a cloud of smoke. On his way out, Bear checked their surroundings again, as if expecting someone to appear suddenly. Reseng watched the bodies of the old man and the dog meld together in the heat.
A surprising number of idiots mistakenly thought they could pull off a perfect crime only if they personally disposed of the evidence. They would lug a can of gasoline to a deserted field and try to burn the body themselves. But cremation was never as easy as people thought. After messing around with trying to set the body on fire, they ended up with a huge, steaming lump of foul-smelling meat. Joke was on them. Any decent forensic scientist could take one look at that barbecue gone wrong and figure out the corpse’s age, sex, height, face, shape, and dentition. A body had to burn for at least two hours at temperatures well above thirteen hundred degrees inside a closed oven in order to be completely incinerated. Other than crematoriums, pottery or charcoal kilns, or a blast furnace in a smelting factory, it was very difficult to produce that kind of heat. That was why Bear’s Pet Crematorium stayed in business. The next important step was to grind the bones. Forensic scientists
