With the war he saw it fully wide and dark and deep. But it wasn’t the usual rough awakening: he’d never been in thrall to the notion of hero. As a soldier he’d pictured himself not a savior, or some killing machine, but rather one of countless figures on the battlefield, just like the toy soldiers he played with all through his youth; each mini-statuette was formed in one of several poses, as either a prone shooter or a bayonet-wielding assaulter or a marcher, Hector seeing himself as the last of these, the ones the other boys didn’t care for and would trade to him at ten to one for the others. He was captivated by the swarm of great numbers, the feel of them bunched in his hands like a massing of tiny bones. On the chipped, painted porch of his parents’ house he’d line them up in neat rows, the marchers, gritty-faced, pushing on, their rifles shouldered, and though many in the front would perish before the shooters and bayonets, he knew their flood would prevail.
Now, as he put the vacuum back in the closet and began filling the rolling bucket, Jung woke up and stood and stretched, yawning wide as a lion before sitting back down. As if he’d slept with a lighter and cigarette in his hand, he instantly lit one up. Hector well knew the pattern of the man’s Saturdays; Jung would play a heavily wagered round at the municipal golf course at Overpeck and then eat and drink and gamble the rest of the night with his playing partners and maybe visit some bar girls at one of the Korean nightclubs in town. In between, when he could get to a phone, he’d bet on football games, baseball games, basketball in the winter. He was in his mid-thirties and married and had young children, but a few weeks ago his wife had kicked him out of their apartment in Palisades Park, fed up with his womanizing and chronic absence and gambling and his unrepentant laziness, which was in fact his core charm. There was an admirable self-comfort in Jung’s manner, like he’d evolved himself so completely that anything but utter acceptance of his ways would be absurd, akin to thinking less of hippos for wallowing in mud, or of flies for seeking dung. Jung never actually worked as a custodian, sub-hiring a day laborer or two off a street corner in Little Ferry to fill in for him; the most he did was light carpentry for the tenants or replace burned-out fluorescent tubes, and of course collect the rent.
“Starting late today, huh, GI?” Jung murmured, checking his fat gold diver’s watch, his eyes squinting against the stream of the smoke.
“Want to know why?”
“What, you have big date last night?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“She fat lady?”
“He.”
“No fucking way,” Jung guffawed, the cigarette tilted down loosely in his mouth. “Don’t tell me this, GI!”
“Relax. He wasn’t there to be nice to me.”
“Oh shit,” Jung said, sitting up in the couch. “You okay? You look okay.”
“I’m all right. But do me a favor. Don’t mess around with this any longer. Pay what you owe. For my sake as well as yours. I might not be around when the next guy comes, and even if I were…”
“Okay,” Jung said, smoking slowly now. “Okay.”
“You don’t have the money, do you?”
“I’ll get it.”
“I hope you win big this weekend, chief.”
“Me too, GI.”
Jung had been calling him GI since learning that Hector had been in the Korean War, or else called him Joe, or Rambo, something else Hector would have never suffered from anyone else but didn’t mind from Jung. In fact he took a small pleasure in the idea that more than thirty years of tumultuous world history should presently lead to a moment like this, for him to be dressed in cheap coveralls, mop in hand, preparing to clean the toilets of a grubby Korean mall in New Jersey for this most slothful of their kind, a man who was, literally, born in a roadside ditch during the war but didn’t remotely know or care a thing about it now.
“But hey, Rambo, you got hot sex last night, too, huh?”
“Why do you say that?”
“Otherwise you’d be real mad at me.”
“I wouldn’t tell you if I did.”
“See, I’m right,” Jung said, leaning back on the couch. He had already forgotten about his betting debts. “I’m glad. I’m afraid you some homo.”
“Dream on.”
“Maybe, brother. You never know. Maybe I’m sick of women. Sick of all their bullshit. You not?”
“Not near as much as they’re probably sick of mine.”
“See what I mean? Listen to you! We getting trained, like this! Fucking bullshit. My wife make me jump up and down whenever she want. Go to work early, go back home early, don’t see my friends, feed baby, fix shower door, fix car. Don’t touch, no sex now. Or, wake up, wake up, sex right now. Now she kick me out and I get same kind bullshit, but from God damn waitress!”
“You should leave Sang-Mee alone.”
“Tell me about it! Whole night she was crying, her face a fucking mess, saying where I been? Why golf take so long? Why poker take all night? How come no more present, no more ring and necklace? How come I don’t love her anymore? I want to say, ‘When did I ever love you, fucking bitch?’ ”
“But you didn’t.”
“Hey, I was tired. Then she got very mad, when I fell asleep. Then she cry some more. She was here for a while but I guess she’s gone.” He immediately checked his wallet, expecting it to be emptied, but there was still a decent slab of bills inside. Being skilled at golf and cards, Jung made his pocket money off his friends; but, after the custom, he spent most of the winnings on their eating and drinking afterward, and whatever was left on his mistresses.
“I’m hungry. Hey, you want to eat? I pay.”
“I got work to do.”
“No problem. I give you morning off.”
“You know I’ll just have to work twice as long tomorrow. Besides, the head’s probably a mess. Mrs. Kim will just complain.” Mrs. Kim owned the Korean restaurant on the mezzanine, and because her customers had to use the mall bathrooms she was often harping on Hector, though more to get him to speak to Jung than anything else. She despised Jung because he never did anything he promised in the way of improvements, but she let him eat gratis anyway (even if he ordered extravagantly), for he convinced his uncle, the mall owner, who lived in Long Island, to keep extending her lease every six months, at a very reasonable rent. She had the cook make the food too salty or sweet whenever he came in with his buddies, so they would think twice about eating there when he next suggested it in the hope of saving himself the tab.
“Okay, you work, and when I wake up again we can eat.”
“Sang-Mee’s working today,” Hector told him.
“You think I give a damn? I’m not afraid of her.”
Last week Sang-Mee spilled a pitcher of water onto Jung’s back, saying it was an accident. Jung had jumped up and might have struck her but Hector had held him back. Sang-Mee mused aloud how fortunate it was that it wasn’t hot soup. This made Jung angrier and he berated her viciously in Korean but she just smiled and went into the kitchen. Jung deserved it; he had been seeing her off and on for the past couple of years, but had dumped her right after his wife booted him, presumably because he had no more excuses about having to stay in his marriage. Hector liked Sang-Mee, for she was always quick with a kind word and had a spark in her eyes that made her prettier than she was otherwise, but then he pitied her, too, for her sticking by Jung for so long.