Construction work is fucking hard.
You’d think everyone would know that, but sometimes you run into people who look down on it.
‘Isn’t construction work basically just exercise? If you’re getting paid to work out, that’s a total sweet deal.’
Obviously, that’s the kind of thing someone says when they don’t know shit. Oh, and of course, I’m not just talking about how physically overwhelming it is. Carrying bricks around, moving nonstop, or hauling huge steel plates up the stairs on your back is hard, but if that were all there was to it, it’d be bearable. For a clueless kid just starting out in society, work like this is the only way to get a big day wage.
But if your crew chief comes to work drunk every day, uses Chinese more than Korean, and has anger management issues, the difficulty of construction work shoots up like crazy.
Not only does it become physically exhausting, but mental obstacles start piling on too.
“You fucking bastard! What I tell you earlier!”
“Ah, I ate earlier.”
“Fuuuck!! I told you not to fuck around!!”
The man in front of me, shouting with his face as red as a carrot, was the crew chief I was talking about. Ah, he might look angry, but that wasn’t it. I hadn’t done anything. He was just the kind of guy who drank every single day before coming to work, so his face was always bright red whenever you saw him.
Seriously, how the hell does he not get fired when he shows up drunk every day?
Anyway, he seemed especially rough today. Well, it wasn’t like there were days when he wasn’t rough, but today his bullshit was a little more intense. His clumsy Korean came flying sharply enough to stab right into my ears.
“I told you earlier, make coffee!! You fucking bastard ignoring me?”
“I made it for you earlier.”
“You Bangzi bastard! Talking back to me?!”
It was truly absurd. I’d seen him gulp down the sweet instant coffee mix I’d made with my own two eyes. And now he came storming over like this in the middle of work, not even during break time.
“You want get kicked out of here?! You talking back to me now?!”
“Haha. Of course not. If you need some now, should I go bring you coffee?”
“Fuck off! You son of a bitch! You think I can’t cut your pay? I got you now!”
After listening to the red-faced foreign laborer’s tantrum for quite a while, I finally started to get a sense of why he was doing this to me.
“Hahaha. By the way, about that offer you made me last time. I’ve saved up some money now, so I think I can accept soon.”
“Offer?! What offer?”
“You know, the one where you said if I lent you money, you’d double it through gambling and give it back.”
“What gambling!! It investment, investment! I found out about an amazing product!”
I’d probed just in case, and it seemed I’d hit the mark. He was acting especially shitty today because I’d politely refused when he asked to borrow money from me last time.
“So when you give it?”
The crew chief stopped shouting and spoke as if he’d already entrusted his money to me. I forced a smile as I looked at him.
“I should be able to give it to you around the week after next.”
Of course, I had absolutely no intention of giving him anything. The reason I didn’t refuse and instead said I’d give it to him was to placate him right now. If that man really made up his mind, he could cut my day wage.
The labor office? Look at the person standing in front of me. This was a job site where a foreign laborer was the crew chief. In other words, it was the kind of place that didn’t give a damn what the labor office said.
So if I wanted to get my full pay, for now, I had no choice but to xiexie him.
“Tsk, tsk. You should have saved up some money.”
Having achieved his goal of coming to borrow money from me, he left after throwing out one last unpleasant remark.
“Haaah…”
Left alone at the work site, I quietly let out a sigh. Who the hell said construction work was easy? I could only resent myself for being fooled by that bullshit and ending up here.
“I wish time would hurry up and pass…”
The week after next, my work here would be over. In other words, I wouldn’t have to see that shitty foreman anymore.
Let me say it again: of course I didn’t have any money to lend that motherfucker. There was no way that certified gambling-site sucker could win money, and even if by some miracle he did, I had a deep-rooted conviction that he wasn’t the kind of person who’d return it to me.
I need to get paid and get the hell out of here fast.
As I was about to continue working with my shoulders slumped, someone sauntered over to me.
“Hey. You were getting chewed out pretty hard just now.”
Blond hair, flashy accessories, and piercings in his ears. His swaggering voice and movements brought to mind a delinquent with bad conduct.
“What the hell is that Chink picking on you for?”
“He came to ask me to lend him money.”
This guy’s name was Gu Sechan. Contrary to how he looked, he was surprisingly diligent. He had some slightly weird hobbies, but he was the only person my age at this site, so we got along well.
“Ha, that crazy bastard. Still hasn’t come to his senses. You’re not thinking of lending it to him like some sucker, are you?”
“Absolutely not.”
“That’s how it should be. Bastards like that borrow money from other people and never have any intention of paying it back. Good call.”
He looked like a punk on the outside, but he was the type to take good care of others. Gu Sechan noticed that I wasn’t particularly cowed and grinned, patting me on the back.
“Good! Shall we get back to work now?”
“Yeah.”
Gu Sechan and I grinned at each other, then picked up the cement sacks lying on the floor and climbed the stairs. We reached the fourth floor, put down the cement, went back down, grabbed more cement sacks, then climbed the stairs and delivered them to the fifth floor. The shitty part was that we didn’t just have to deliver them to one place, but all over the damn building.
“Ah, fuck, why the hell do we have to put these on every single floor?”
Gu Sechan grumbled as he picked up the cement sacks. The guy was freakishly strong, so even though he was carrying forty-kilogram sacks in both hands, he didn’t look tired at all. In contrast, I barely managed to carry one sack on my back, sweating buckets.
“Isn’t this how construction work normally is?”
“What kind of construction site only makes you do stuff like this?”
“All the sites I went to were like this.”
“Haa… You’ve got truly awful luck too, huh.”
Gu Sechan looked at me with eyes full of pity, like he was looking at something tragic. There was no need to look at me like that. They were all places that paid high day wages, so of course they were hard, and since I got paid as much as I worked, I was personally satisfied.
Of course, this place was much tougher than the sites I’d worked at before. And the reason was entirely because of one person. The construction-site freak reeking of alcohol, who came looking for us while we were carrying cement sacks up the stairs.
“Hey! What you doing here!”
It was because of the crew chief, a gambling addict and alcoholic.
“What do you think we’re doing? We’re doing what you told us to do.”
“You fuck! What kind of way to talk is that!”
Maybe Gu Sechan’s curt tone got on his nerves, because the crew chief glared and ground his teeth.
“So what is it? Coming over all of a sudden to people who are working just fine.”
“What do you mean working just fine! There’s so much work to do, and you still haven’t finished that?!”
“No, realistically, how could we have finished this already? And there’s a lot of work? Aren’t we leaving once we finish this?”
I watched the crew chief, his face red as he shouted, and Gu Sechan, who said what he had to say without being intimidated. Apparently, he wasn’t afraid of getting his day wage cut. Even though he’d watched Mr. Kim leave without getting a single day’s pay last time, he could still act like that.
“Grrr…! Anyway, even after you finish that, there’s plenty more work, so keep that in mind!”
As if he didn’t want to talk to Gu Sechan anymore, the crew chief shouted one last time and started heading back to his own work area. I watched him comfortably take the construction lift up to a higher floor.
“Haa… Why does that man do this to me?”
“Was there ever a time he didn’t? We really need to get out of this place fast.”
I bent down to pick up the cement sack I’d set on the floor again. Just then, Gu Sechan grabbed my shoulder and stopped me.
“Let’s do it in a bit. I brought something interesting.”
“What is it?”
Gu Sechan grinned, then took out a palm-sized object from his pocket and showed it to me. Seeing the familiar shape, I frowned and looked at him.
“A straw doll? Why are you carrying something like that?”
“Kekeke! Don’t be shocked. This is a curse doll I bought from a special spirit medium for an enormous sum!”
“What are you going to use it for?”
“To curse someone, obviously. Let’s use it on that fucking Chink bastard.”
Looking at Gu Sechan’s sparkling eyes as he stared at me, I let out a sigh. His seemingly ordinary but slightly weird hobby had kicked in. This wasn’t the first or second time he’d done something like this.
“Last time, didn’t you bring some weird pottery and make a fuss saying there was a ghost inside it?”
“There really was a ghost! I was showing it specially just to you!”
“Oh, please. What ghost? The pottery broke the moment I touched it. I told you, you got scammed.”
“Tch!” Gu Sechan clicked his tongue once, then picked up a concrete hammer lying nearby.
“Watch closely. This time, it’s real. It’s a real curse doll.”
Saying that, he placed the straw doll on the floor and struck it hard several times with the hammer.
Thud! Thud! Thud!
“Now, look at this! It’s real, right?”
Gu Sechan grinned as he showed me the straw doll. A straw doll that had been struck so hard with a hammer should have been smashed. However, the straw doll was perfectly fine without a single scratch.
“Didn’t you just hit it weakly?”
“Come on. You see it and still don’t believe it. If you’re that skeptical, you try it.”
Gu Sechan snorted and handed me the concrete hammer. I gripped the hammer in my right hand and looked at the straw doll lying on the floor.
The doll’s body was woven from rotting straw that had completely lost the vitality it must once have had when it was golden. The damp, sodden strands of straw had black mold blooming here and there, like age spots spreading over decayed skin.
What kept that rotten body from falling apart was red thread. In contrast to the decaying body, that red was vivid, like blood that had just been spilled.
“Hmm…”
I let out a low hum as I looked at the straw doll. Looking closely, it was extremely dirty. How the hell had Gu Sechan been carrying something like this around in his pocket?
“Hurry up and try it.”
Unaware of my question, he kept urging me on.
‘What the hell am I even doing?’
I let out a hollow laugh and raised the hammer in my hand. This was a straw doll that had stayed intact even when Gu Sechan, who was stronger than me, struck it with all his might. I didn’t know why it was so sturdy, but I was certain it wouldn’t break even if I hit it.
I’ll just smack it a few times, get it over with, and finish the work.
With that thought, I brought the hammer down.
Thud.
“Huh?”
The unexpected part was that, even though I hadn’t struck it that hard, the doll was crushed so badly it lost its shape.
“Hm? That can’t be right?”
Gu Sechan was startled and crouched down to examine the doll.
“It broke this much already?”
“See? I told you stuff like this is all a scam.”
I frowned slightly as I looked at the crushed doll.
I had definitely only struck the center with a hammer smaller than the doll. Despite that, the doll’s entire body had been mashed.
Had it turned out like this because I’d hit the red thread binding the straw together? That seemed like the right way to see it. The red thread that had wrapped around the doll was now snapped and scattered on the floor.
If there was one strange thing, it was that the thread, which had been mysteriously red before, had now faded.
“Did I really get scammed?”
Gu Sechan looked as if he were about to cry. From what I could make out of his muttering, it seemed he’d bought that thing with the money he’d earned working at a construction site for a month. I didn’t particularly feel guilty about breaking it.
Gu Sechan wasn’t the sort of pathetic guy who would demand compensation over something like this, and in the first place, wasn’t something like this the fault of the person who got scammed? Not that I was saying the scammer wasn’t in the wrong, of course.
I turned my eyes away from the tearful Gu Sechan and looked at the doll one last time. From between the straw of the doll, which looked as if it had been crushed by something unimaginably huge, a black liquid was seeping out.
Mold water? A small sense of admiration welled up in me for Gu Sechan’s intelligence, for having paid so much money for such a filthy thing.
“Look at that rotten water coming out. How did you even think to pay money for something like that?”
“Huh…? Rotten water? Nothing’s coming out, though?”
“You’re saying you can’t see the black water coming out of that moldy straw right now?”
“Moldy? It’s a bit old, sure, but I didn’t neglect it badly enough for it to grow mold.”
What? Could he really not see it? I looked at Gu Sechan’s face suspiciously. He didn’t look like he was joking. What the hell, then? I’m the only one who can see that?
Just as I was falling into confusion over this incomprehensible situation,
a vibration ran through the building.
“What the hell! Is it an earthquake?”
“An earthquake in Korea?”
The vibration stopped before long.
But not long after the shaking ceased, a heavy chain writhed through the air like a snake, and along with the sharp crack of a fixing pin being ripped out, a tremendous noise rang out.
“Huh?”
I turned my head and looked toward the construction elevator installed on the building’s outer wall.
At that moment, I saw the elevator, which should have been descending slowly, plummeting toward the ground at almost free-fall speed.
Koooung—!
I quickly approached the outer wall and looked down. There stood the crumpled elevator, and the foreman, limping as he struggled to get out.
It hadn’t fallen from that high up, so he didn’t seem to be badly injured.
But as I was looking down, I saw an enormous shadow on the ground cover the foreman’s head.
“You fucking bastards! Call an ambulan—”
Kooooooong—!!
Koooong—!
Thud!!
Thud!
Massive rebar and structural frames that had fallen from the building’s rooftop crashed down onto the foreman.
“…”
Was it a coincidence?
The red blood flowing out from between the structures embedded in the ground looked far too similar to the pitch-black filthy water that had seeped from the straw doll.