Sugarland
Part 6: Chapter 26 - end
· 26 ·
Rudy Nobles had the same keen face as his brother. He looked a couple of years older than Ray; he drove. Before we left he asked me why I was going to Lanao, and I told him I was trying to find a woman. After that none of us had much to say, but as we turned off the coast highway he did tell me: “If we run into the army, show those papers. If it's the NPA, try to hide the papers. Tell them it's because of a girl, it will make sense. Otherwise it doesn't make sense. And tell them, ‘I am not an enemy of the people.' That helps.”
“Just to say it? Anyone could say it.”
“A true enemy of the people would never say it. It would choke him.”
Except in the towns and the roadside settlements, though, we didn't see anyone. Once we were in the hills I had to pay attention so that we didn't miss the turn to Lanao. There had been rain here. Puddles sat in the road's depressions, and the air was soupy. We drove up the spur and parked, and once more I wound and poked my way among the huts, the clay sticky on the soles of my shoes.
The hut was dark. I knocked and spoke my name, and hers. Through the sheer fabric I watched the lamp glow float across the room. A hand pulled the curtain aside. An old woman's hand.
“I want Vangie,” I said.
“Vangie is no here.” She said it with pity. For me. The last time anyone looked at me with pity, I was bleeding on the floor.
“Where is she? I want to talk to her.”
“Wait,” she said. She drew me inside and went out. I
“The mother of Vangie has not much English,” the woman said. “She ask me to tell you that Vangie is okay, she is well, but Vangie cannot leave with you to the States. Vangie's message to you is that you must go home now.”
“Why?”
“It is impossible.” Translating.
“Vangie wanted to go with me.”
Directly, the woman said: “Yes of course she want.”
“Where is she now? I should be hearing this from her.”
“It is better you do not disturb Vangie.” Translating again. “The situation of Vangie is the same now since before you come here.”
“Correon?” I said. “She's with him?”
“Vangie belong to Correon,” the woman said.
“Nobody belongs to anybody else.”
“Vangie belong to Correon.”
In the silence outside, in the direction of the courtyard, a automobile engine turned over and revved. I listened to the sound. The revs picked up. The Nobles' car was moving. I went out on the top step. The car was moving fast along the spur. In the space between two huts I saw its headlights rake the papaya trees.
I hadn't paid them. I wondered what would make them drive away from a hundred fifty dollars. Death, was all I could think of.
Somewhere in the barrio a woman began to shout, a frightened jabbering.
I heard a rustle, a pounding of feet.
A young man stepped around the corner of the hut. He looked as if he belonged to the barrio. Gym shorts, rubber sandals, a T-shirt. He was in front of me before I could react. When he saw me, he raised a pistol and pointed it at my face.
I raised my hands. He wasn't army.
“I'm here to see a girl,” I said. “I'm not an enemy of the people.”
Another young man came around the corner of the hut. He was carrying a rifle. I saw the curved clip, the wood stock. It was an AK.
The first one grabbed me by the wrist and yanked me down the steps. They exchanged a couple of sharp bursts of words. Something shone around the neck of the second one: a silver crucifix that hung from a leather thong. There was more to the shine: a tiny glass vial, liquid-filled, with a cap of silver filigree. At his hip a knife handle grew out of a long, broad, wooden scabbard.
He turned me around. The muzzle of the rifle bumped me hard in the back, and bumped me a second time. He wanted me to walk. I walked. The one with the pistol jumped up into Rosita's hut, and in a few seconds jumped down and went into the hut next door.
From the shoves and bumps in my back, I guessed that the one with the rifle wanted me to go toward the courtyard. I did, and he stopped pushing. Up and down the irregular rows of huts I could see more vigilantes going in and out of doorways, sometimes coming out alone, other times dragging out men and herding them toward the front of the barrio. About half a dozen other riflemen were waiting in the courtyard. They lined up the ones they had taken from the huts. They held their guns on the line, and they made me join it.
The line expanded for a few minutes until it contained fifty or sixty men, all about the same age, early thirties. The bustle in the barrio simmered down. More vigilantes came out to the courtyard as they finished searching the huts; they must have gone through every one.
One vigilante walked out to face us in the line. He was a short, round figure, who strode with a stumpy swagger. If vigilantes had officers, he was one. A name wriggled out of my memory. From the Star: a certain Baldomero Capas.
He swaggered to the far end of the line. He aimed the flashlight into the face of the first man, took him by the chin and swung his head to the side, to see him in profile. He said a word and the man backed out from the line, then turned and walked quickly toward the barrio, then ran.
The next in line. The next. Next. Blinking in the light, standing for examination, running away when they were released. He went down the line and examined each one and sent each one away.
When he finished the last one he said, “Hijo de puta.”
He came over to me. He put his belly up against me and peered at me with a dire scowl that might have been comical at another time and place.
The rifleman who had taken me said a few words. His officer said, “So you're not an enemy of the people. The people must be happy to hear that.”
“I'm an American,” I said. “Look, my passport.”
He let me take it out of my pocket. I gave it to him, and he put it under a flashlight.
“See, and a safe-conduct pass from the general, and a note from Luis Correon.”
He examined it all. The papers seemed to fascinate him.
“You're looking for someone,” I said.
“Remy Ortiz. NPA. Kumander Rocky.”
“In Lanao?”
“That is the report.”
“Well, you can see, I'm not quite him.”
One of the riflemen knotted a length of hemp from around his waist. He stepped behind me, grabbed my right arm and pinned it back. Another rifleman grabbed the left, and they tied the rope around my wrists.
“My passport, I'm an American,” I said.
“Shut up,” said Baldomero Capas. With contemptuous care he slid the passport and papers into my shirt pocket.
They walked out of the barrio and marched me with them. We headed east, into a cane field, toward the mountains. The stalks weren't as high here as on the other side, and I bent to keep them out of my eyes. We left the field, crossed a freshet, and entered another field. That one stopped at the foot of a bluff hillside, and when we got to the top, the mountains were directly ahead of us, dipping in and out of clouds that obscured a rising moon.
Twice we climbed high scrub-covered ridges, twice dropped down into valleys where terraced paddies mirrored the moon. There was no more cane. In the second valley, we didn't climb straight out, but followed a stream that rose gradually, the valley pinching in around us, flocked in high, dense trees that formed a canopy overhead, real jungle.
We came out on a clearing fringed by cogon grass. Beyond the clearing was a stand of rattan and more jungle, billowing foliage. We were almost across before I saw that we weren't walking into just grass and trees. An unkempt flourish of brush became a thatched shelter. A lodge of bamboo materialized out of the rattan. Boys with rifles stepped out of the cogon's pale stalks and white tufts. I glimpsed barbed wire strung on posts. Sentries, a lookout tower of coco logs, slit trenches.
They took me through a break in the wire, to a dugout with a canvas roof. They pushed me inside without loosening the rope at my wrists.
Inside, darkness was heavy. The floor was mud. The walls were rough-sawn planks up to ground level, topped with courses of sandbags.
I picked myself out of the mud. I saw that I wasn't alone. Another man crouched in one corner. I went to the
His English was fluid and unaccented. I went over and sat a few feet away from him. He was thirty or so, as close as I could tell. There was little light, but there hadn't been much light for the last hour or more.
“American,” he said.
“That's right.”
“Not the American who's been coming to Lanao.”
“That's me.”
“Luis's hospitality isn't what it used to be.”
I didn't know him, and from the upturned lines around his face, he seemed amused that I didn't know.
Even in full light I might not have recognized him. In all the world he was the last man I expected to see.
“Your night isn't a total loss,” he said. He waited a couple of beats. “I'm Lito Sanchez.”
When he said it I knew. He was Lito, and he was there, grinning at me, and the grin infuriated me. It was as if my troubles were embodied, having a good laugh at my expense.
I said, “You little twerp, if I could put my hands on you, you'd be a dead man.”
“Precy'd get her money, anyway.”
“Laugh,” I said. “People are dead because of you.”
“I know.” He got serious. “When I saw what was happening, I wanted to stop it. But by then there was no stopping it. There were other lives involved, too.” When he stopped talking I could hear the plink of water into a puddle, somewhere in the dugout.
He said, “Believe it or not, I had my reasons.”
· 27 ·
The son of a bitch has had his hooks in me since the day I was born (Lito said, with a con man's easy command of the vernacular). That's the way it is on a hacienda. You own nothing, not even yourself.
You may think you do. You think you have a life, even if it's not much, it's yours. But there's the amo, that's the big boss, the owner of the hacienda, and what you think is yours is really his. All of it. If he sees something of yours that he likes, you can kiss it good-bye. I don't care what it is. Your water jug, your dog, your daughter. If he wants it, it's his.
He doesn't necessarily even have to like it. Sometimes he'll take it just for the hell of it.
I'm telling you this so you'll understand the mentality of somebody who was brought up on a hacienda. The amo, the hacendero, he's God. The amo giveth, the amo taketh away. Mostly he takes. You do not question the amo. What he wants, you give him.
In my case, what he wanted was me. I look at myself, I can't blame him. Not to brag, but let's be realistic. I've got brains, I've got balls, and I've got nothing to lose. It's an unbeatable combination. Fucking Luis is not stupid. He knows a good thing when he sees it.
What got me noticed, I was eighteen years old, cutting cane, living in the barrio. My cabo, that's like a crew boss, an assistant foreman, had a brother that was a peeper. He'd hide in the bushes by the creek when the girls were out taking a bath. One day Precy comes home crying. She was alone at the creek, and she saw the guy doing his thing, you know, choking his chicken, shuffling his cards. She was all upset. These barrio girls, they're sensitive.
Normally, a case like that, you expect the father to make things right. But my father had the farmhand's attitude, meek, don't rock the boat. A cabo is a powerful guy, and furthermore this one and his brother were cousins of the overseer. My father told Precy, don't go to the creek alone anymore. Not a word to the cabo or the brother.
To me that wasn't good enough. I sweetened the edge on my cane knife. I waited till the middle of the night. I went to the cabo's house, I found the brother, I put that knife to his throat. Believe me—there's nothing will wake you up ruder than sharp steel on your neck. I told him, you're still around by sundown, I'll eat your eggs for dinner.
He was out of there. But first he told his brother. The brother told the overseer, and the overseer must have mentioned it to Luis. Next thing I know, I'm sitting in Luis's office. I'd seen him once or twice before, but never this close. Never to speak to, definitely. And he's saying to me, “You threatened the brother of your cabo.” I say, “That's right, I got nothing against my cabo, but his brother is a fucking pervert.” I say, “You want perverts on your farm? It's your farm, it's up to you, but if you ask me, this makes you look bad, perverts on your farm.” Talking all kinds of trash, you understand, because I was scared. I already knew, the scareder you are, the crazier you should act.
I'm not saying that Luis bought the act. But he liked it. He told me I didn't belong in the fields. He was right about that—you don't want troublemakers on the farm. He made me a bodyguard. Really, I was on a crew of four or five guys that more or less took care of details, you see, all the jobs that people with juice and money always need doing. Deliver this, pick up this, meet so-and-so. I don't mean going to market, either. The kind of thing where you carry a gun, use your head, and don't ask questions.
The rough shit didn't get bad for a couple of years. It'd be, Hey boys, they caught another union organizer on the farm, why don't you escort him off the property. And if you
I was good at it. Not just the rough shit. All of it. Luis trusted me. He had something tricky, he'd call me. I'd get it done. Me, I'm living high. My father is busting his ass for fifteen pesos a day, I'm making one fifty, two hundred. Big money for a kid from the countryside.
One night, I'm visiting my family, Remy Ortiz walks in. My best friend from the barrio. By now he's with the Nice People, I haven't seen him in over a year. And he's got a gun. He says, I was sent here to tell you, what you're doing is wrong, and if it doesn't stop, I have to make you stop. He meant the rough shit. He says I shouldn't be doing dirty work for a criminal boss. Luis.
I had no idea it mattered to them, what happened on the farm. I wasn't seeing the big picture yet.
But a word to the wise. I got the hell out of Dodge. I had a little bit of money, I went to Manila and bought a share in a taxi. All the time, Luis stayed in touch. He's always got this or that he needs doing in Manila. Not rough, necessarily, but where you have to trust the guy who's doing it for you. It was money for me. I didn't mind. Even if I'd wanted to say no, I never would have. He was still my amo.
I met my wife in the taxi. An airport fare to the Hilton. We got married in city hall, Manila, we went back to the States together, I got my green card, I got divorced. I stayed. I didn't hang around with homesick Filipinos, either. No way. I dived in with both feet. I learned to walk the walk and talk the talk. I was an American!
Inside of a year I was speaking English like I'd been weaned on it. I loved the food, I loved the life. America is so easy. But even in America, Luis kept in touch. Through my family, you see. He wants this and that. Ship him a color TV and a microwave. Parts for his Jeep. One
In '84 he came and set up a bank account. He made me a co-signer, so I could draw on it when I had to pay for this stuff. He wanted something, he'd transfer the money there, I'd take it out. By now I had my own little sidelines working. Luis was starting to be a pain. Besides, I'd had a chance to think things over. I'm realizing, the situation on the hacienda, he's getting rich while people like my father are working themselves to death.
But what could I do? He had my family. It was weird, walking around in the States, knowing that some son of a bitch had owned me since day one. Here I was in the Land of the Free, thousands of miles away from him, and he still had a piece of my ass.
Then my father did die, just plain worn out, fifty-two years old. The more I thought about it the more pissed I got.
I went over for the funeral. Luis told me, buy a couple of pistols and bring 'em over. He said not to worry about customs, he had it fixed. He did. A little later, the same thing, only it's not two pistols, it's ten, and ten shotguns, and a couple of Uzis. He was selling some and keeping a few for himself. These planters love their guns.
That was the year sugar prices went through the floor. I came over, I went to the hacienda, people were starving to death. Not my family, I saw to that, but our friends, neighbors. It was never that bad before. Babies with swollen bellies, the whole sick scene. Luis had to cut way back. Instead of a new Mercedes that year, he only bought a Cadillac. I was at the point, whenever I was around him I'd have to take a shower after I got home. It was like swimming in a cesspool. But I still didn't know what to do about him. Even after I bought the house for my mother, he could still get to her. And there's all the brothers and sisters, the aunts and uncles and such.
If I was alone in life, it'd be different. I'd have told him
Three months ago, he calls, he wants me to buy guns. Fucking assault rifles. It's all set up, where I'm supposed to go, what I'm supposed to do. He wired sixty thousand to the account. That's how confident he felt, to put that kind of money in my hands. He knows I'm not going anywhere.
I thought he was bringing the guns in to sell. Everybody from the farm is writing, telling me that Luis has seen the light, no more rough shit, he's treating them decent, he's actually paying off the NPA. Luis is bitching to me, how much it's costing him to stay straight with the Nice People. It didn't sound like Luis. But who am I to say?
I did what he said. He could have done it himself, but I don't think he wanted his name connected with it. All right, I've done my job, I figure I'm free and clear. Then he tells me, I should come over ahead of the guns. He needs me here. I should plan to stay two, three years. I'm going to be working for him again. Not asking me. Telling me, I'm going to be working for him again. He says like before, only more so.
Then I know, Luis may be paying, but he's still fighting. I didn't want to get involved in it. I also knew, as long as I was alive, I'd be doing exactly what he told me. That's when it came to me, what I had to pull off. If Luis wasn't going to let me go till the day I died, I'd have to die.
It wouldn't be the first time, right? Not that he'd be as easy as an insurance company.
If I had to die I might as well do it right. I cashed out everything over there, I took out the policy, I brought over a new car and a couple of pistols. One of ‘em I sold. The other one I was going to keep. But Luis's boy saw it, Baby, and he loved it. He took it. Promised to pay me, but I knew he never would. The son of a bitch just stole it.
Luis told me what he had in mind for me. There was
Other planters raise their private armies, they tell the world about it. A guy hires three or four security guards, all of a sudden he's calling himself a warlord, he's begging the Sparrows to put him on their hit list. Luis is much too slick for that. He keeps quiet, he still pays his NPA dues, he stays off the Top Forty.
Me, I was supposed to join a new goon squad that he was forming up. Heavyweight stuff this time. He mentioned names that I knew from before. I told him I wanted to spend a couple days looking up old friends. No problem. He never worried about me—he always had me, any time he wanted.
I looked up old friends, all right. A few years, Remy has turned into Kumander Rocky. A goddamn folk hero. Give me a break. We got together. I told him what I needed, what was going on, but I don't think he believed me. Then the guns started to show up. The S.D. gets sixty new AK's, Yugo-made, they're kicking ass all over the place. Including the hacienda, my barrio.
Now Remy is ready to help. They have a shootout with the S.D., they recover a body. Remy's boys carry it into the cane outside Lanao. I show up with rum, get half the barrio drunk, I know everybody's going to be sleeping real hard. I have the empty hut all picked out. They haul in the body, we torch the hut, I head up to the hills with Remy and his bunch.
I'm dead. Everybody knows I'm dead. Best of all, Luis knows I'm dead. I'm so dead, I can't believe there's any problem with the insurance. It's the last thing I'm worried about. But the first insurance guy shows up from the
States. I didn't even know about him until he was dead. Then you. Jesus. And more people dying.
It was supposed to be a bonus, fifty thousand, icing on the cake. I told Precy before I left the States, anything happens to me, I want you to use the money to get Mama and the family out of the province. Everybody, right through second cousins. Buy a couple big houses, maybe in Cebu. A few hectares, two or three little businesses to keep money coming in. It would be enough, fifty thousand. Over here fifty thousand dollars is a fucking miracle. It will buy you anything. Including freedom.
He said he'd been captured in the NPA camp when it was overrun. One of the vigilantes was from Lanao, recognized him, and knew that Luis would want him.
“A good thing, too,” he said. “Otherwise I'd be in little pieces now. It might still happen, but, hey, small favors.”
“Nobody knew you were alive?”
“The Nice People, that's all.”
“And Nonoy.”
“Never. He'd be the last I'd tell.”
I told him about the note that said LITO LIVES. To understand that he had to hear the rest, so I told him about the names, the girls, Father Dado and Collins, through to Bembo. I talked a long time, a ghastly recounting in the damp darkness.
He took it with an equanimity that shocked me at the time. I suppose I understand now. Those were my deaths. I had claimed them for myself, felt the hurt, nursed the anger. But when deaths pile on deaths, miseries upon miseries, who can assign any of them a particular outrage, bestow on any one a special grief? Who is entitled?
And when I had finished, and it still seemed incomplete, I told him about Vangie and me, up to Rosita telling me to go away. He listened hard without interrupting.
“The girls,” he said when I was finished, “the names, I
“I can tell you, Nonoy didn't know I was alive. He wasn't even guessing. That was just his way of getting you to stay around. You were his wild card, man, you were his great white hope. He didn't want to lose you.”
“But he couldn't tell me?”
“That's exactly it, he couldn't. If he was my father, I'd be ashamed, too, I wouldn't be able to tell anybody. And with him it's even more complicated. Luis isn't just his daddy, he's Nonoy's amo, too.
“Think about it, what it must be like. He's got Correon blood in him, so Luis hauls him out of the barrio and dresses him up. But he's got the barrio too. Every time he comes up there, he knows it's in him, but he's not part of it any more. On the other hand Luis doesn't treat him like a son. So he's everywhere, he's nowhere, he's got two families, he has no family. For sure, I wouldn't want to be sleeping in his skin. You have to understand his position. Like you have to understand Vangie's position, if she tells you to take a hike.”
“Vangie and I have plans.” The present tense sounded empty.
“No doubt you did. I'm sure she'd be with you if she could. But if Luis found out about you two, and he tells her she's not going anyplace, and she knows that he's got her mother—I mean he has got her mother—then plans mean nothing. She's not even gonna fight it.”
“What?” I said. “I just go home, forget it? Nothing's changed?”
“That's the hardest thing for Americans to understand. That some things can't be changed. Actually in your case the situation isn't necessarily so bad.”
“How is that?”
“Your only problem is to get rid of Luis. And it happens, the way he's been acting, people are lining up for the chance.”
· 28 ·
Next day the sun unloaded on the canvas. The wet floor cooked with an odor of compost. A guard stood outside, a silhouette on the fabric. Lito and I sat pouring sweat, inhaling the miasma, motionless except to shift our cramped arms.
We spent the whole day this way, then another night. In the afternoon of the second day—Saturday—the rain came again, a few minutes of thunderstorm that soaked but did not cool.
The camp seemed sluggish until evening, when we heard more movement, shouts that sounded like orders, the click and snap of magazines and firing bolts, the squeak of cartridge belts. They were leaving the camp; from the sound of it, by squads, about ten at a time.
Not long afterward our guard and another rifleman came down. They had been in twice during the day, to loosen the ropes and hold rifles on us while we drank water and ate some rice and voided into a bucket. Now they came and pulled us to our feet.
“We're out of here,” Lito said.
They sent us up the steps.
“I want you to know,” he said when we were outside, “when you get to the States, you should do what you have to do about the insurance.”
“I will.”
“So. What are you going to do?”
“I don't know,” I said. Wondering if I would get the chance.
“Remember, I could just as well be dead. It might be more convenient to think of me as dead.”
He was laughing when he said it.
The guards brought us over to where eight more riflemen were standing, waiting, beneath the guard tower. With five of them in front of us and five behind, we walked out of the camp, through the cogon and down the widening valley.
The air was torpid. The moon was fat, fuzzy behind clouds. In low spots the mud sucked at my shoes. On the steep slopes I grabbed brush and trees to keep from slipping, but fell anyway, and before we had gone far my clothes were soaked and smeared.
After about an hour the clouds slid free. We were going in the same direction we had come the night before; not the same trail, but from the top of a ridge I could recognize a valley below, and another ridge embracing it on that side. I could see trees and a few huts and the silver rectangles of the paddies. We dropped down through the forest, down two hillsides into rolling cane. Through fields, through fields, the cane leaves making ticks and swishes until we briefly broke out into the clear. That's when I heard the low coursing sound of the generator at the hacienda bungalow.
It was Saturday night. I knew where we were going.
Another wide field. The cane here was nearly as tall as a house. The generator's drumming seemed to center itself directly in front of us, when gunfire grumbled distantly to our left.
“Curba,” one of the riflemen said behind us.
“Curba, that's a sitio,” Lito said. “Like Lanao, but smaller, couple of miles away.”
“Part of the hacienda?”
“It sure is.”
The grumbling stopped. Almost at once a couple of
We emerged from the end of the long row. Above us were stars and black sky again. The bungalow sat on the hill. There were riflemen at the foot of the knoll, others behind clumps of bamboo. Orlando was waiting at the first of the stone steps that notched up the incline.
He went to Lito first.
He said, “Compadre. Very stupid,” and cuffed Lito on the side of the face with a soft swat that was not soft enough to be friendly. He said a few words, and two of the riflemen held Lito by the elbows and took him around the knoll, in the direction of the caretakers' cottage. The door was closed. Lamps burned behind the curtains.
Orlando was unsnapping a pocket knife when he came to me. He walked around to my back. He didn't touch me except to hold my arms as he slipped the blade between my wrists and yanked it upward. The ropes fell apart.
He said, “Next time, my friend,” and gestured up the hill.
As I climbed, the rifles sounded again in Curba, an irritated mutter that quickly died. I stopped at the top of the knoll and looked back. A ruddy glow bulged above the horizon, out where the first shots had come.
The Mercedes and the white sedan I had seen behind Danny Boy's were parked beside the bungalow. A flagstone walk brought us around to the front, where four bodyguards lounged. One of them was a kid cradling a shotgun. A tall kid with gaunt cheeks and a dirty bandage on his right arm. He smirked when he saw me. One hand came up to his forehead, and he made a motion like tipping his hat. Though he wore no hat. I was past him, opening the door, when I understood. The hat was Bembo's straw fedora.
The riflemen stayed outside while I went in, out of the night and into the incandescent glare, the eerie chill. The buffet table was laden. Penney stood at the table, holding
Vilma and Hector carried in the tub of iced beer. I wondered who was in the cottage. They went out, and it was just three Americans in the room.
Dalzell pulled a bottle out of the tub, popped the top and crossed the room to bring it to me.
“You smell like a dead rat,” he said. When I didn't take the bottle, he drank from it.
“You knew her,” I said.
“Once I saw the picture, uh-huh. I met her once or twice right in this very place.”
“You told Correon.”
“I shit you not, Jack, this job's nothing but a juggling act. Try to give to one without taking away from the other. I had to cover myself.”
“Anyway, it's all over,” Penney said.
“What does that mean?”
“You're going home,” said Dalzell. “Embassy plane's at the airport. We got you booked on United out of Manila, first flight tomorrow morning.”
I said, “I want to talk to Vangie.”
Penney piped, “No can do. I'm afraid she's a write-off.”
“Why make it hard on everybody?” Dalzell said.
I went to a chair across the room and let myself down in it. I didn't want to speak right away. I had to get something solid under me.
“Don't fight it,” said Penney. “This is a done deal.”
“What's going to happen to her?”
“I didn't ask.”
“He doesn't even want her.”
Dalzell said, “I didn't think he would—he's got a million of 'em. Really, when I told him, it was just a courtesy call. When he found out she was splitting, though, she started to look real good to him again. Ain't that the way?”
I held the arms of the chair.
“I'm not leaving until I see her. You can't make me go.”
“You got to be joking,” Dalzell said. “This isn't a question of can we make you, it's what happens if you don't. You have a guy extremely pissed off at you, he isn't somebody you want to be on the bad side of. As a personal favor to Rick here and me, he's letting go of you. He doesn't owe us any favors, believe me, it's all the other way around. A personal favor, though, he's letting you go. That's as of this minute. Subject to change.”
I said, “Do you realize what he's into? His people killed Collins.”
“Not according to the reports,” Penney said.
“The reports are a bad joke. Correon owns Orlando, and Orlando is running a bunch of killers. They murdered Collins and they murdered a priest. They tried to blame Collins on the Sparrows.” I kept going, running out of breath. “With the priest they tried to make him out to be a communist, but he wasn't even close. He died because he found out something about girls, prostitutes, four of them that disappeared from a club in Bacolod.”
“Fascinating,” Dalzell said.
“Ask him,” I said, gesturing to Penney. “He knows, he's in on it.”
“Fuck you,” Penney said.
“Furthermore, you two and Luis and his scum have got a war going over here.”
“This is right by the numbers,” Penney said quickly, with some heat. “It's absolutely legal. Socorro is a private enterprise. We don't wage war. Advice and assistance, that's all. That's not breaking anybody's laws.”
Dalzell was much calmer, almost bemused.
“C'mon, don't get righteous on me,” he said.
Penney said, “I'll do anything to keep our boys from getting in a real war over here. But maybe you're not enough of an American to see it that way.”
“No, Jack's okay,” Dalzell said, easy and smug. “He's
I held the chair and tasted a black, impotent fury. I couldn't move. I couldn't think of moving. I saw that Penney was distracted, alert to something outside: gunfire, rattling again in Lanao.
“The hacienda is a nest,” Penney said when I noticed it. “Commie Central. The G's have been using it for one big safe house. Harvest's almost over, Luis can do some housecleaning.”
“Can we go now, Jack?” Dalzell said. “Please?”
“I want to talk to Vangie.”
“God damn,” Penney said.
Footsteps came down the hall, into the sala. Baby and Nonoy. Baby put his clutch bag down on the buffet table and began to fill a plate.
“You'd better get him out of here,” he said.
“We're trying,” Penney said.
“Yes, Jack, right away,” Nonoy said. His voice had an urgent quaver. He was wound tight.
Baby took his plate over to a window across the room. He said, “He should see this. Maybe it'll light a fire under him.”
I went with Dalzell and Penney. Nonoy came too—reluctantly, I thought—and we looked out together, down to the bottom of the hill.
Correon was leaving the caretakers' cottage. He had a pistol in his hand. Lito Sanchez was standing in the open area between the cottage and the foot of the hill. The two vigilante guards stood nearby. Correon walked up to him and spoke. Lito spoke. A broad grin grew on his face; I recognized it.
Correon clubbed the grin with his pistol. The force drove Lito to one knee.
Lito stood again. The grin was still there. Correon began shouting; ranting. His arms waved as he shouted,
It seemed to infuriate Correon. He stopped pacing. He shouted even louder. His head bobbed as he spat what had to be curses. Lito wouldn't look at him. Correon pulled the slide of the pistol and snapped it back. That loads the chamber and cocks the trigger. It makes a loud, purposeful noise that will get anybody's attention. Lito didn't flinch.
I heard Nonoy's breath catch beside me as Correon put the muzzle against Lito's head. Lito's grin was determined. Correon took the gun away and stepped back. I thought he was finished. Abruptly he stepped up again and put the gun to Lito's head and fired. Lito jerked and collapsed.
Nonoy grunted, like taking a punch in the stomach.
That's when the shooting started, in the field behind the bungalow. Maybe they were expecting the signal of a single shot, and Luis's seemed right. They opened with the popping of two or three rifles at first, a series of quick reports, automatic fire. This was out in front of us as we watched, not in Lanao but much closer, on the other side of the bungalow. Quickly the two or three guns became eight and ten and more.
“Armalites,” said Baby. “NPA.”
We crouched at the window, Dalzell saying shit, shit, shit. I looked over the sill. The two guards had flattened on the ground; one of them steadied his gun on Lito's chest. Correon was walking quickly to the shelter of the cottage. The two riflemen cut loose long strings of fire.
Beyond where Lito sprawled was a band of landscaped grass and shrubs. Beyond that was a stubble field eighty to a hundred yards wide, a minor patch where an enterprising overseer had shoehorned a few extra rows of cane. At the other side of the stubble was cogon and brush and bamboo and scrubby trees, the riot of growth that explodes on any untended ground in Negros. The guerrillas
Bullets thumped the turf halfway up the knoll.
Four more vigilantes, then three more, ran from around the back side. They took cover where they could find it, and began firing over the stubble. Correon left the cottage and started around the side of the knoll. I watched him until he was out of sight. When I looked again, one of the vigilantes was on his back, mouth agape, staring at the sky with eyes that didn't blink.
The door opened. Orlando said, “Time to go.”
“Yeah, I think I've seen enough for one night,” Dalzell said. He stood up to leave, and a bullet shattered the window above Baby, spraying glass across the sala.
“The lights,” Orlando said. “Stay down, are you crazy?” He reached around to hit the switch, and the sala went black.
We moved low in the darkness, scuffling blind. The buffet table got bumped hard. Platters crashed to the floor. Dalzell and Penney were out first, and I followed them into the moonlight. Baby got to the door and said, “Shit, my gun,” and duckwalked in again.
Nonoy came out. He sat with his back against the door post. His tension had resolved itself into something else: he seemed almost distant. There might have been no gunfire, no guerrillas. I watched him for a few seconds before he noticed me. He said, “Don't worry. Soon this will all be over.”
It sounded absurd at the time. I wondered if he was quietly losing his grasp.
Orlando was at the Mercedes, shouting into the radio mike. The firing was louder, hammering of AK's and hard pops of M-16's; the pops were closer than they had been, more insistent. The blister of light pulsed in the sky above
“My gun.” Baby was inside, groping on the floor where the food had spilled. “What happened to my fucking gun?”
Correon came up the back side of the knoll. He stopped at the Mercedes and spoke to Orlando, and while the radio squawked he pointed up the long driveway that tracked to the road. More vigilantes—I could make out the AK's—were emerging from the field east of the drive.
Dalzell said, “Why don't we just haul our asses out of here?”
But as the new squad came into view, more orange stars winked from behind the mango trees that lined the drive. Some of the vigilantes dived, some fell.
“That was battalion headquarters,” Correon said loudly. “Help is on the way. Fifteen minutes.”
“So it'll be thirty anyway,” Penney said.
“What if it is? Thirty minutes is nothing.”
“We have the high ground,” Orlando said.
“I'm thinking that we might make for the trees,” Dalzell said. He was looking at the forest where the gully ran through, the path to Lanao. “Jack and Rick and me. They don't especially care about us.”
“Fine,” Correon said. He was miffed.
“Unless you think we can help you here.”
“I wouldn't presume. 'Noy, go hide our friends. I'm sorry, I can't give you any guns. We need all our weapons here.”
“Oh that's all right,” Dalzell said.
“I'd rather stay,” Nonoy said.
“Go. Stay with them until it's over. It would be a shame if they got lost.”
“I can help here.”
“I said go.”
When we left them, Correon was yelling at the vigilantes
We went down the knoll, to the path and into the trees. Right away the frenzy became more distant; the tall growth smothered sound. It cut off moonlight, too, but it was a comforting cloak, to be out of sight of the fighting. Every step carried us away from it.
Nonoy was agile on the path. He had grown up here, I reminded myself. He stopped twice to let us catch up. The second time he halted at the edge of the forest, where the gully met the cane field: I remembered the tunnel through the stalks. But in the last week the cane had been cut. The field was stubble, all the way to the back corner of Lanao.
Nonoy was looking that way when we caught up to him. Several huts were burning; the fire turned his face vermilion.
“Too far,” he said. He turned at once and led us back up the path, a short distance to a spot where the gully was deep and narrow. A natural trench. We slid down inside and found ourselves standing neck high in it. We were hidden from the tumult, safe from anything but a fateful wild bullet. A few minutes later a squad of vigilantes came up the path from Lanao, ran past and up to the bungalow without realizing we were there.
Dalzell and Penney sat glum at the bottom of the gully. Nonoy hiked himself up the side and rested his arms at the lip; I joined him up there. Brush grew between the gully and the trail, a screen that didn't block our view entirely. I could still see up and down the path, but the path was empty. The forest was empty, except for the noise from outside. The firing had stopped in Lanao and over in Curba. Up toward the knoll it had an acrimonious rhythm, rising and cascading, a tempest that couldn't sustain itself. Inevitably it would dwindle to a gun or two, or to nothing. There would be silence; once the noise lapsed so long, I thought it might be finished. But each time it picked up again, bitter as before.
Nonoy turned inward once more, and I did, too. The forest was a private place. I thought of Vangie and felt my longing. I thought of deaths and betrayals and unkept promises and humiliations. I felt them deeply; later I would be astonished at how clear and whole my emotions were, not just that night but all those bright days and murky nights. So unlike me. They were never more clear and whole than in the minutes when I lay along the side of the gully. I can be snappish, but I need time to work up a good head of anger. In the forest I had time. I had never hated, never had reason to hate; but in the forest I found reason. All this, with the muted sounds of violence in my ears, murderous and suggestive.
Thirty minutes, Penney had said. Maybe—hard to tell. But however long it was in coming, it came sudden and shocking. First it was helicopters, two of them, racketing in from the east. One launched a parachute flare from high above the bungalow. The forest became a black and white mosaic, shadow and light swaying as the flare rocked slowly to earth. The second chopper swung in low overhead, shaking the trees and raining brass shells from the machine gun that fired out of one hatch. It had hardly passed when a T-28 attack plane ripped overhead, bellowing, guns clattering, so low it shook trees and earth.
Through breaks in the forest canopy I watched the helicopters rake slowly back and forth over the battlefield, lacing down tracer streams. The T-28 flew a pendulum path, swooping low to fire, climbing and turning and swooping low again: the sweeping of a scythe. On the ground the firing was scant and suddenly irrelevant.
Dalzell and Penney were up at the edge of the ditch now, whooping and shouting.
“This is the World Series, man, this is goddamn Indy and the Derby.” Dalzell was shaking my shoulders, yelling into my face. “This is the freaking Super Bowl, baby, and we've got sideline passes.”
One of the choppers broke off and climbed over the
“Pickup time,” Dalzell said. “Curb service, can you beat it?”
I heard voices on the path, up near the top. Voices I knew.
Dalzell and Penney didn't notice; they were climbing out with all their noise.
“Let's go,” Penney said.
Nonoy had noticed. Through all the shaking and the roaring, his face hadn't cracked. His face …
“In a minute,” I said. “I want to watch.”
“You want to watch?”
“It isn't over yet.”
“You watch. We're skedaddling,” Dalzell said. They were walking through the brush. It was above their knees. “The chopper won't wait.”
“It'll wait. Luis isn't there yet.”
“That's all right. First one in gets the seat by the window.”
“I'll be there.”
“You got guts, Jack, I have to hand it to you.” He was yelling at me from the path. Penney was beside him. “No kidding, I never saw anything like it.”
They ran. The chopper was settling into the field; I could tell from the noise and the dust. Four men had appeared up the path. The second flare wiped them with light and shadow through the trees. It was Baby, Luis, Orlando with an AK, and the gaunt-faced killer carrying a shotgun. They were walking single file in that order, coming our way, briskly but by no means in a panic. The chopper would wait.
Nonoy was looking up at them. Staring. He didn't seem
He reached under his shirt, his loose cotton barong, and pulled out Baby's .45. It was the gun I had held and fired at Correon's backyard range.
The brush hid Nonoy. I was in the gully, almost completely out of sight. The four of them came walking, tramping. Nonoy's hand kneaded the .45. They were walking toward us, yards distant, feet distant; walking; passing.
Nonoy stood.
He didn't bring the gun up; kept it at his side. I watched this over the tops of the brush, in the swinging light of the flare. The four of them had passed us already, but Nonoy's rising stopped them and swung their heads around. The kid with the shotgun, at the end of the line, was now closest to him.
Luis said, “'Noy.”
Nonoy began to raise the gun, much too slowly. He got it up and held it at the end of his rigid arm, as if it were a viper. He had probably never held a gun. He swung the gun past three of them, and it seemed to settle on Baby.
Luis said, “'Noy.”
Baby said, “Shit,” and bolted down the path. The pistol in Nonoy's hands swung to follow him, and Baby ran, and Nonoy kept pointing the pistol but didn't fire.
His face was contorted. He was in agony.
Luis raised his own gun, and it roared. Nonoy flew off his feet and did a dead man's pratfall back into the gully, splayed out beside me.
Baby kept running down the path.
Nobody had seen me yet through the brush. Luis said a word, and gaunt-face came toward the gully. He came closer, using his shotgun to part the undergrowth. He bent and picked up Nonoy's pistol where it had fallen, and put it in his pocket and kept coming. With a look of mild curiosity and contempt, he stepped to the edge of the
I grabbed the shotgun, pulled hard. His grunt drew out, he fought for his balance. With one hand I held the barrel out away from me, and hooked the other around his ankles, and I brought him down.
He toppled headfirst into the gully, and we both fell on the body. I reached for the pistol, on his right side, and he punched and kicked. The shotgun roared once into the air, and we kept grappling, and the pistol flopped out of his pocket. Onto Nonoy's chest, sticky with warm blood.
Heavy strides were breaking the brush, coming on, closer. Orlando. I grabbed the pistol. Gaunt-face kneed me and lunged for the pistol.
I squeezed the trigger. Nothing. I thumbed the safety—still on—Nonoy poor fool—squeezed—the gun roared and jumped—and gaunt-face's limbs shot out in convulsion, and he fell back.
“You fucker,” Orlando said at the edge of the gully.
I turned my head to look at him. I could see him, above me and to my right. The AK was already pointed down into the gully, and though I started to bring the pistol around, it was with painful slowness, painful deadly slowness, and while I swung the pistol up and around he had only to tip the rifle down a few degrees more, and he did, and I was looking up into the muzzle, a couple of feet away.
His eyes met mine. A rifle hammered, a burst, and Orlando seemed to dive into the gully, a sudden and curious dive, headlong, the AK leaving his hands and sailing. His face was the first part of him to thud into the earth. He lay prostrate. Even in the night I could see dark rosettes of blood blooming on his shirt.
I peeked over the edge of the gully, and what I saw made me push over the edge and stand, to see it better.
The boy Alex crouched about fifty yards up the trail,
Baby was running down the path without looking back, lumbering toward the noise of the helicopter.
Correon spoke a word. What he said I'll never know, and anyway it was probably less important than the way he said it, with a sneer. And maybe that didn't matter, either; maybe nothing he might have said, no way of saying it, could have saved him.
Anyway, he spoke a sneering word, and Alex touched off a burst that nearly cut him in half, starting at his groin and stitching upward through his face as he flew backward.
Baby kept running without looking back. Alex leveled the rifle down the trail, but the trail dipped and bore Baby out of sight.
Alex lowered the rifle and walked down the trail to Correon. He stood over the body and stared down at it for a few seconds. He was not angry, not repelled by the gore; curious, mostly, I thought. A few seconds was all he needed. As if the body wasn't even there, he picked up the pistol and stuck it in his pants. His legs made quick little steps over to the gully, where he climbed down, slung the AK, held the shotgun. He put his hand out for the .45. I let him have it.
Down the trail, out of sight, Dalzell and Penney were shouting my name.
“Come dis way,” Alex said.
He climbed up the back side of the gully and pushed into the trees. I followed him. Carrying half his weight in guns, he ducked and slipped through undergrowth that stood above his shoulders. I barely managed to follow.
The firing had stopped everywhere. I didn't hear the plane anymore. One helicopter was still on the ground; the other seemed to be loitering above the knoll.
We had gone a couple of hundred yards off the trail when Alex stopped beside a matted tangle of vines draped over a fallen coco log. He pushed the vines aside. He brushed dirt and lifted the top of a crate that had been buried flush with the ground. Expertly he dropped the magazines out of each gun and emptied each chamber. He laid the guns and the ammunition in the crate, replaced the top, covered it with dirt, and put the mat of vines back where it had been.
He took me out of the forest and into a cane field. We cut across the grain of the rows, then followed one row until it ended.
We emerged near the end of the long driveway. The bungalow was to our right, chalky under the moon. Dolorous moans wafted across the clearing. Between the cane field and the knoll I counted nine fallen figures, a couple of them writhing, the others still. Vigilantes and communists, I couldn't tell the difference. We walked down the driveway, away from the bodies and the moaning. We walked out into the road, into one of the most amazing sights I have ever beheld.
The road was full of people. Lanao was in flames, and the people were pouring out of it, hundreds of them, bringing what they could in rice sacks and boxes and in their arms. What struck me wasn't so much their numbers as their compliance with disaster. They walked slowly, wearily, mostly with eyes downcast, as if shamed by what had befallen them. As if they had done this before and expected to do it again. They were silent; there were many children, but not a cry or whimper. I could hear the scuff of rubber sandals, the snort of a pig being led on a rope. I could hear a young woman's voice softly inquiring: “Rosita? Rosita Flores? Rosita?”
It was Vangie. She was standing by the side of the road, looking like the daughter of the barrio that she was. Hector and Vilma were with her. She gave Alex a hug that he endured with a look of distaste. Your parents are up the
We joined the exodus down to Hermosa. In Hermosa the town council had set aside a couple of vacant lots for use by evacuees from the rural barrios and sitios. In Hermosa they were accustomed to this kind of thing.
We got there around dawn. The money that I was going to give to the Nobles brothers I gave to Rosita instead. Vangie said it would be much more than enough for a furnished room in town, and that a furnished room in town was much more than she expected.
Go, go, the old lady told us.
From Palo we caught the express jeepney straight into Bacolod. We were on Princess of Negros when she sailed that noon.
· 29 ·
I expected Vangie to loathe the duplex with its fog and bland mornings. To my astonishment she nestled in. I still have moments of joyous surprise when I find her sitting with me at dinner or beside me in bed; none is so shocking, though, as the sight of her walking the beach in a heavy wool jacket, out with gulls and seals and hissing wind. I think the grayness appeals to her.
We were married in our living room, a month and a day after we arrived from Manila. Not long afterward, she returned from one of her sandy treks and announced that she wanted a graduate degree. She is pregnant now with our first child, and in graduate school. I'm still with the
I have never told Vangie what happened along the forest path. Correon's death, attributed to the NPA, was in the Manila papers the day we docked. She may have read it, perhaps not. In any case she has never mentioned him, and neither have I. She did tell me that she had been in the caretakers' house that night, and witnessed Lito's execution. Otherwise, we have never discussed the cruel hours between our kiss at the threshold of the hut and our reunion on the Hermosa road.
Acquaintances ask: Has she adjusted? The easiest answer is that Vangie would never languish anywhere. She is happy, and she belongs. She has learned to drive the freeways. She reads food labels and has been properly indoctrinated in the hazards of cholesterol and saturated fats. At movies she laughs in all the right places. She fits as if she were born here. Actually the fit is even closer than that—she has a newcomer's relish for our comforts and opportunities.
Yet there are moments when I know that she is not one of us, and never will be.
I have to go back to my last full day in the Philippines, the day the ship docked in Manila. We had taken the ferry because nobody would look for us there. For the same reason, we checked into a cheap pension on Mabini Street. I still had a lock box at the Silahis, though; I wanted to empty it and arrange our flights. It was early afternoon. We needed clothes. Vangie left to shop while
I finished at the Silahis in five minutes; the travel agent was almost that fast in snapping up seats on a flight the next morning.
The agency was in the ground floor of an office building on the boulevard. I came out knowing that I had our future in my shirt pocket. Knowing that in a day I was gone and might never be back.
The building had a doorman. I stood with him in the heavy heat, looking out at the bay and the beggars along the breakwater. The pension on Mabini Street was two blocks away.
I said to the doormen, “Do you know a place called Tondo?”
“Yes sir, Tondo Manila. Near by the North Harbor.” So we had gone through it when we left the docks. A cramped, shabby district.
“Right across the river.”
“Yes sir, other side of the Pasig River.”
Twenty pesos, a few minutes.
“Taxi, sir?” Looking for the tip. I said yes, and he whistled one into the curb.
Earlier we had only skirted the edges of Tondo. The 400 block of Jison was in its squalid bowels, an amorphous clutter of shops and shacks. Burning garbage fumed in a heap at the intersection; kids poked sticks at a dog's rigid corpse. Four nineteen was a beauty salon. A sunless alleyway, barely wider than my shoulders, led to the back. I heard Sinatra, faintly. Chicago, Chicago.
A closed door, four steps down. On the door, scratched into the paint: KNOCK TO ENTRANCE.
I went down and knocked. Somebody opened it, and Sinatra got louder as I stepped in. A mattress lay in the middle of a basement room. A man and a woman were humping on the mattress, to an audience of about a dozen men who gawked from chairs against the walls.
Around the back of the door a woman said, “Forty pesos, sir.”
“I'm looking for Dolores Rosario.”
She said, “I am she.”
She was about Vangie's age, and she was gorgeous. A cascade of long black curls, the big eyes of a fawn, perfect skin, perfect teeth. Under a thin bathrobe she was naked and womanly-slim. It was the kind of beauty that doesn't have to try.
“A man named Nonoy Paloma sent me to see you.”
“Nonoy is my friend.”
“I think we're supposed to talk about something that happened at a place called Danny Boy's.”
With hope and caution she said, “You know about this?”
“Some of it. I think girls have been dying.”
She said, “Girls? More than one?”
“Lorna Rodriguez. Alma Solano. Tetchie Salvador. Vivian Maamo. I think. Does this mean anything to you?”
Each one seemed to strike her harder. She put her hands to her face.
“The monster,” she said.
“Correon.”
She nodded dumbly.
She let me take her gently by the elbow, to two empty chairs in a corner. Courtliness didn't seem out of place. She was no slattern.
I moved the chairs to put the mattress behind us.
We sat, and she said, “I know only Lorna. Four years ago already. I am living in Hinigaran, in the south of Negros. My husband dies, my child is hungry, I go to Bacolod—”
I said, “You went to work at Danny Boy's. You needed the money. You met Correon.”
“Yes. He is a friend of Orlando. They are partners, I think. He doesn't come to the club. Orlando sends girls to him at a special house in the countryside. Nonoy brings
“Correon.”
“He is sadist.” She shifted the accent; I didn't understand right away. “One night it's different. He is angry. Not a game. Very angry. I am tie with a rope. All right? Lorna is tie. To me he is cruel. But I don't fight. I'm still alive. He wants somebody to fight, I think. Lorna fights. He kills Lorna with his hands. I'm watching. I see it. I am there.”
She was daring me to challenge her.
“Some men come for Lorna—I don't know who they are. Nonoy brings me to a doctor. He says because of what I have seen I must leave Negros. He gives me money. He feels bad. I know, Nonoy always likes me. He writes me letters, even up until now. I don't know anything about three more girls. Nonoy promise me, it will never happen again. Suppose to be, the father is very displease.”
“The father—”
“Luis. The father of Baby.”
For an instant I was back in the gully beside the forest path. Nonoy swinging the pistol past gaunt-face, past Orlando and Luis, to cover Baby.
“Baby killed her?”
“Yes. Baby. Of course Baby. He is sadist. The monster.”
I collapsed inside. I guess it showed: she held my hand in maternal comfort.
“Don't feel bad. That's life. My boy is five years old. A beautiful boy.”
Someone called her name.
She said, “Sorry. My turn.” The mattress was empty. “You go now, huh? Good-bye.”
I went to the door, but I didn't leave right away. I watched her stand at the mattress. Along one wall four men had begun a puerile joshing among themselves. One
With enormous dignity she awaited him. I was aware again of her loveliness. It amazed me. The existence of it. Here.
A market exists for beauty. To be base but realistic. Prices are bid, goods are shown and find their niche; rare goods bring high sums and are consumed in stylish places. By the logic of the marketplace she didn't belong in this toilet, at forty pesos. If anyone did.
She looked directly at me as she opened the robe.
Her stomach was a mass of welts, horrible scars mottled dark and light. They wrenched the eye from her beauty. Once she exposed her midriff, she might as well have been a hag; it didn't matter any longer.
The man was affronted. He called out roughly. She didn't answer him. He took off his shirt and snapped it at the scars. His friends found this hilarious, and he began to circle the mattress, waving the shirt. She turned to keep him in front of her. In turning, her back came into my view. It was a vivid road map of mutilation. Grooved depressions scored her muscles, some straight across, others slashing at a diagonal from shoulder down into buttock. What had created them, I couldn't imagine. She had no skin: only tissue that had hardened into slick lumps.
As I was saying: Vangie. She is happy here, she is thriving, but she is not like us. She has too much in her. Most often I am aware of it when she has gotten some news from home: a letter, or the occasional Bacolod dateline on a newspaper squib. The news is almost always bad, and it always affects her. I know; she would never insult me with false good cheer.
Our private life is rich and quiet. I approach her when she is hurt. I am privileged to touch her bruises and to behold their depth. I embrace her in the night. We do not speak. I stroke her with utmost gentleness. I am reminded