Adaptation by Hyun Jee

Introduction: This is an adaptation of a scene in which Holden asks the cab driver about the whereabouts of the ducks during wintertime.

The call ban that I had was a real stinky one; it just smelled like someone’d threw up after a long night of drinking up so-ju. I always end up in this vomity kind of cabs if I have to go back to school phony as hell. Boy, what really kills me in this goddam boring trip back to a near ghost town, Hoengseong, is the deadly crowdedness of feverish Daechi-dong “ajummas”, even though it was Sunday night. As soon as the ban leaves the gate of my house and reaches the goddamn center of Daechi-dong, what  knocks me out again is the flitty high school girls crossing a street, with their hands holding tightly and all, or a swarming group of wonky students reiterating all you could bet wasn’t nutritious to their brain. This all phoniness depressed the hell out of me. But finally, after I was riding a while, the ban driver and I sort of struck up a conversation. His name was Duk-su. He was much less phonier guy than the other driver I had last month. Anyway, I thought maybe he might know about the squirrels always around my school.  

“Hey,” I said. “You ever notice the little hill that leads up to my school?”

“The what?”

“The hill. Up the little winding lane. Where the squirrels dig around and run in circles all day long. You know.”

“Yeah, what about it?”

“Well, you know the squirrels roam around. In the springtime and all? Do you happen to know where they go in the wintertime, by any chance?”

“Where who goes?”

“The squirrels. Do you know, by any chance? I mean does someone just stops by to pick them up in a truck or something and lead them away to better land, or do they just run from prairie to prairie by themselves—go south or something?”

The old ban crash stopped at the red light and Old Duk-su snapped back at me. He was a very impatient-type guy. He wasn’t a phony one, though. “For Chrissake, why the hell do you care?” he said. “How the hell should I care where a stupid squirrel goes in wintertime?”

“Don’t get too sore about it,” I said. I could tell that he was being sore about me or something.

“Who’s sore? Me? No, I am not sore, the question is, for Chrissake, sore, bud.”

We ran in silence for the next few minutes, for he seemed to get so damn touchy about it. But he broached the squirrel thing again himself. He turned his head all the way around again in the next red light and said, “The squirrel don’t go no place. No one comes to take them up to the warm place for god sake. They stay right down the goddam hill.”

“The squirrel, by themselves? You sure?”

“Use your head, for Chrissake. When the icy snow covers up the hill, what else would they do? Run away to somewhere no icy? Everywhere is icy during winter, and people find where they find nice and warm. Squirrels no different. Nothin’s different about them.”

I thought for a moment. ‘Boy, nothing is different. The squirrels, the people...and…’

“All right. What do they do under the ground and all, under that whole little hill’s a solid block of ice. Do they keep running around in a circle?”

This time, the red light was not even on, but Old Duk-su turned around again. “What the hell-aya mean what do they do? They stay right where they are, for Chrissake. Their bodies, for Chrissake stores nutrition and all before the ice covers the ground. That’s their nature, they stay right under and don’t move.”

“Oh,” I said. I didn’t ask more question, for this madman, but a good man was going to smash this old, squeaking ban against the only streetlight that shone our way down the darkest street of Hoengseong.