Chapter 2 — I Bought a Telecaster

The wall of guitars inside the store was taller than her grandparents' house.

They hung in rows under the fluorescent lights, and when Yeonha read the price tags dangling from their tuning pegs, all she knew was that she could never afford one with her savings.

$749.99. $1,149.99. One sunburst guitar, hung slightly apart from the others behind a velvet rope of its own importance, was $2,399.

Somewhere in the back of the store, a grown man was playing something very fast and very badly. Nobody seemed to mind. Yeonha understood that this was a place where that was allowed, and also that it was not a place for her.

In the end, a guitar, which she had wanted for half a day on a whim, wasn't going to change her, who had nothing.

When Yeonha turned toward the glass doors to end this detour that had only made her feel foolish, someone spoke behind her.

"You need something?"

A store polo shirt that fit him the way things fit when they are issued rather than chosen. He was somewhere around thirty, with a beard that had been a decision at some point and was now just there, and a tiredness in his face that did not come from that day. The name tag on his chest said DARRELL.

He spoke little, and his voice was flatter than his face, as if he had said the same few words to a great many people and stopped expecting anything back. There was something faintly charming in it anyway. Yeonha, who was the type to walk past the church volunteers handing out flyers in front of the Walmart without taking one, was about to leave the store without answering, but instead she stopped and answered the clerk.

"I wanted a guitar, but it seems I don't have nearly enough money."

When one lived as a permanent guest in other people's houses, one learned how to decline things. The best way was not to respond at all. The second-best way was to say you had no money. Yeonha expected the clerk to write her off as a browsing kid and drift back to wherever he had come from.

Surprisingly, the clerk looked at her face and then quickly looked away.

"You alright with used?"

The used guitars hanging near the counter were nicely polished. Their tags listed the model, the year, and the condition—Excellent, Very Good. Even the used ones were four and five hundred dollars.

There was something wrong with what this clerk was saying. Yeonha wanted to leave right away, but she didn't, because she was starting to think that this clerk, who was bad at talking to customers and didn't make much eye contact, might be one of her kind. She didn't see any other employee in this corner of the store.

Without saying anything, Yeonha waited for the clerk's next words. Even if it was impossible to buy a guitar today, if she was going to keep saving her lunch money and the allowance from her father's benefit, maybe get a job at the Sonic next summer, and someday buy a proper used guitar in Fayetteville or on the internet, it was better to have some product knowledge.

In that case, maybe a chat with this strange clerk wouldn't hurt, she told herself.

The clerk went through a door behind the used counter without saying anything, and came back carrying a guitar. Yeonha understood half of what he had meant by "You alright with used?"

This guitar was different from the carved, glossy, flame-shaped things on the wall. It was flat and plank-like, with a plain bolted-on neck, and even Yeonha had seen its shape before without ever knowing its name—in the hands of the house band on a country music show, on the stage of the church her grandparents went to, in the corner of every bar commercial. It was the kind of guitar used for work.

It was a guitar called a Telecaster.

She had come to look at guitars expecting something that would add something to her life, not another daily necessity, but the guitar in front of her was nothing more than a tool. And it was very dirty, as if it had spent years leaning in the corner of somebody's garage. Dust had settled into the bridge. The strings were brown with rust.

The clerk wiped the body down with a rag from his back pocket, and then held the guitar out toward her. Is he telling me to try holding it? Yeonha thought. The only thought that welled up in her was that there was nothing to be gained by holding such a thing.

The clerk seemed to sense her hesitation, and spoke while dropping his eyes to the headstock.

"Hundred bucks."

Yeonha wiped her palms on her jeans and took the guitar without hesitation.

It wasn't too late to decline after holding it. At a price that wasn't much different from the bicycle she rode every day, she was beginning to think that it might not be so bad if her evenings had a sound in them.

She sat down on a small amplifier, laid the guitar across her lap, wrapped her left hand around the neck, and rested her right hand over the strings.

The strings hummed under her fingers.

An unplugged guitar. A quiet aisle. A sound that shouldn't have been there. She wondered what it would sound like to really play it.

Yeonha looked at the clerk's face and spoke.

"I'll buy it."

Right after she said that, Yeonha noticed something unnatural. She didn't know how much a used Telecaster normally sold for, but this was too cheap. When she looked closer at the guitar on her lap, she saw that beneath the dust the finish was barely scratched, and the frets showed almost no wear. Whoever had owned this thing had hardly played it.

More importantly, the clerk didn't look like a man who had just landed a naive sucker. He didn't meet her eyes and made no salesman's smile. If anything, he looked reluctant to sell it.

Yeonha asked him point-blank.

"Why is it a hundred dollars?"

The clerk spoke, his eyes still down.

"Three people that owned it are dead."

Yeonha had about as much feeling for ghosts and curses as anyone else. She had never seen a haunted object, but she had always thought it wouldn't be strange if such things existed. Until now, she had lived her life carefully avoiding the risk of becoming the fourth victim in situations like these.

"I don't mind. I'll buy it."

The clerk lifted his gaze and looked back and forth between Yeonha and the Telecaster for a while, like a man whose mind hadn't caught up with a negotiation that should have ended in refusal.

Then he said, "Register," and turned around.

Yeonha followed him to the counter. Apparently, an electric guitar wasn't something you could just buy and play like a harmonica. The clerk spoke, covering the words Yeonha was about to ask.

"Amp and cable?"

She had half known, without ever thinking about it, that an electric guitar made almost no sound by itself. The clerk added a small, scuffed practice amplifier the size of a lunchbox to the counter, and a cable, and rang it all up. With Arkansas sales tax on top, the total took almost all of the savings Yeonha had accumulated from her skipped bus rides and packed lunches. She paid with the debit card her grandfather had set up for her, signing the little screen with a signature that never came out the same way twice.

The clerk slid one more thing across the counter: a thin pamphlet of chord diagrams, so old that the paper had gone the color of weak tea and the cover price said sixty cents.

"Chords don't change," the clerk said.

He kept the guitar. "Saturday," he said, and Yeonha understood about half of it—something about strings, and something called a setup, and that none of it would cost her anything.

For the next three nights, Yeonha read the yellowed pamphlet in bed with the radio on. The chords had names like apartment numbers. E minor looked possible. F looked impossible.

On Saturday morning she rode her bike back down the frontage road. In front of the used counter, the clerk was bent over the Telecaster, polishing it.

The grimy guitar was now so clean that she could hardly recognize it. The new strings threw off the fluorescent light like something freshly minted. The clerk looked up and saw Yeonha, but, as ever, he didn't smile.

He set a plastic bag on the counter next to the guitar. Inside was a black nylon gig bag, a strap, and three picks.

"How many people did these kill?"

The clerk, who had not smiled even once until now, showed an expression that suspiciously resembled a smile.

"Brand new. Promo stock."

There was a poster on the wall behind him that read, FREE ACCESSORY KIT WITH ANY GUITAR PURCHASE. The guitarist on the poster had hair like a lion's mane. Yeonha recalled that she had seen the same man on a TV commercial recently, and that he had been bald for a long time now.

The clerk plugged the Telecaster into the little practice amp on the counter, turned the volume knob to two, and showed her three things: where the power switch was, which knob did what, and how to hold a pick so it wouldn't fly out of her hand.

Yeonha held the pick the way she was taught, aimed at the thickest string, and picked it once.

A low, round note came out of the amp, wobbled, and hung in the air of the store longer than she expected. It was a clumsy sound, like a bicycle ridden by someone still learning. She was too afraid to try two strings at once, so for now, she was fine with that.

She zipped the Telecaster into the gig bag and put it on her back, bungeed the amp to the rack of her bike with a cord the clerk gave her without a word, and pedaled out of the parking lot onto the frontage road. The evening air had cooled a little. The cicadas were still going.

The lonely girl with nothing now had a Telecaster.

차용 목록 (Borrowed from Super Cub, vol. 1 ch. 2)

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