by P. F. Kluge
Uncle Harrison was startled. But Camper didn’t care about that. “Lead the horses back into the trees, Meade. Now!” He turned to Uncle Harrison. “It’s the Japs. The Japs are coming up the road.”
Harding had wondered what the enemy would look like. There was some part of him that hadn’t quite believed in them. The news on the radio, the bombing of Baguio notwithstanding, he hadn’t seen them and seeing was believing. Now he saw. There were four men in a jeep, a driver and officer in front, two men in back around a mounted gun. They sped down the airstrip and, when they reached the mining shacks at the north end, they paused, turned, and stopped. The officer had binoculars and scanned the perimeters, cliffs, streams, forest. Then the jeep began to move, very slowly, around the edges of the airstrip, a reconnaissance that would bring it to within a hundred yards of where the Americans were hiding.
“Wait till I give the order,” Camper said. “Harding, Sudul, go for the machine gun. The rest shoot the ones in front.”
The jeep came nearer and nearer, so slow, so confident it looked like something that had been separated from a victory parade. Harding saw the saucer-like helmets, cloth draped out the back, the off-white uniforms, wrapped puttees. He saw the officer, a white, heavy, unhealthy man, and the driver, swarthy as a peasant. He saw the machine gunner was a cartoon Japanese—yellow skin, buck teeth, spectacles. His companion was jabbering and smiling.
“What are you waiting for?” Meade urged.
“Shit!” Camper whispered. “Look!”
At the end of the airstrip, a truck lumbered forward, canvas covered at the top, open at the sides, and loaded with Japanese. The jeep and truck met at the center of the airstrip, then moved together to the mining shack. A couple dozen Japanese soldiers hopped out, formed up, and began a search of the area around the old mine.
“What now?” Polshanski asked.
“We hope they leave,” Camper said, sighing. “Soon.”
The Japanese were staying. While some probed the area around the mine, others carried some wood out onto the airstrip and started a fire. Then a merry, whistling orderly ran across the airstrip with a cook pot. When he reached the river, the Americans could recognize him for what he was: the unit runt, gofer, mascot, the cuffed-around misfit who lived for a kind word. They watched him lower the pot into the stream, saw the surprise on his face when he felt the coldness of the water. They heard him slap the water on his face. He gasped with pleasure. They shared the moment he had, squatting at the side of the stream, scanning the mountains, watching clouds pass overhead, the sun dappling leaves in the forest where killers were concealed. Reluctantly, he picked up the pot, climbed up the bank, and headed back to safety.
“They’re cooking,” Camper said. “That must mean they’re staying the night.”
“That’s it, then,” Sudul said.
“How about it, Mr. Wingfield?” Camper asked.
“I don’t want to keep you,” Wingfield repeated.
“If we’re going to do something, we should do it,” Meade reasoned. “If we’re not, we shouldn’t be here.”
“You’re right,” Harry Roberts Harding said. “Here’s what we’re going to do.”
CHAPTER 15
Thanks to the report Harrison Wingfield brought to Corregidor, which was conveyed from there to Australia and America, the events of that afternoon at an unnamed gravel airstrip in the mountains of northern Luzon put Harry Roberts Harding in a line of leadership, and legend, that went from Custer and J.E.B. Stuart back to Hannibal. For Harding had led what was acclaimed as “the last cavalry charge in the history of warfare.” Years later, he repeated the phrase slowly: last cavalry charge in the history of warfare. Think about that, he said. A last cavalry charge had to happen in warfare. When else? And wars were part of history. What else? So drop the “history of warfare.” That left you with “last cavalry charge.” But of course there was no way of knowing that it was the last such charge. So when logic whittled away at headlines you were left with cavalry charge. But the men weren’t cavalry, not really. So what you were left with was six men on six horses, five of them looking at Harding for a signal that might never come. He stood beside his horse, well back in the trees, Sudul and Uncle Harrison on his right, twenty feet apart, the others at similar intervals to his left. All of them were watching him.
“I hope, I hope, I hope,” Harry Harding repeated. Hoped that the sense of easy victory would make the Japanese complacent and that the isolation would make them careless and that the weariness of the long hot day would settle over them, and that the orderly would tell them about the river, the cool and bubbling river, and thus lead the compulsively clean and fastidious Japanese to their deaths.
And late that afternoon they came, a relaxed and laughing company, led by the eager-to-please orderly, who pointed the way down the bank, showed them deep pools, stripped and plunged in ahead of the rest, as if to demonstrate that no harm could come to them here. And his reward was that they tossed his clothes in after him and laughed as he chased his undershirt downstream, wading from pool to pool, slipping over slick rocks.
Watching the Japanese climb out of their uniforms, stack their weapons, and clamber down to the water, Harding wondered if the war had ended. These men were off duty, at peace. They were civilians, more than civilians, they were children, naked kids at that. Most of them. At the top, where the airstrip was, three Japanese remained in uniform, rifles at hand, waiting their turn. Even they were more like lifeguards than sentries, smiling, pointing, commenting on bellies and penises. They would be the first to die.
Harding glanced left and right, raised his hand, pointed forward, and the Americans rode out from hiding, quietly, step by step, pausing between the last rank of trees. At that last moment, even as he raised his Springfield, Harding saw that it was left to the orderly to be the first to see them, to stand naked in a wading pool, shock on his face and a scream in his throat that was lost in gunfire by the time he delivered it.
Some of the Japanese dashed for their uniforms and were shot with one leg in their trousers, one leg out, sometimes both legs in but belt unbuckled, so they tumbled back down to the river like the victims of a lethal potato sack race. Others dashed naked up the hill, modesty be damned, going for their guns, and these were shot before they reached the top, so they lay on the grass, some still, others moving, like fresh-caught fish tossed on a bank. One or two stayed in the water, as if that would protect them. They ducked beneath the surface, holding their breath, but the river barely covered their backs. Harding saw Meade, the cruelest of the Americans, ride down to the river and train his gun at a Jap who’d hidden beneath the water. He could have shot him right away, but he waited for the man to surface, then he shot him in the arm, and the man went underwater again, to emerge and be shot again, this time in the leg, and as he went below a third time, into the pool his blood was turning red, there was no knowing how long Meade would have prolonged the torture if Harding hadn’t shot the man. That was the first man he killed.
“The jeep!” Charley Camper shouted. “They started the jeep!”
A couple of Japanese had driven the jeep to the center of the strip where three survivors of the river rushed toward them and climbed aboard, wet, bleeding, naked, like shipwreck survivors jumping into a lifeboat. When they were on, the jeep raced off toward the far end of the airstrip. And stopped.
“What’s that?” Harding asked. The Japanese were well out of range and none of the Americans were about to pursue a jeep down a winding mountain road.
“What are they up to?” Meade wondered. “Why are they stopping?”
“My God,” Polshanski said. “I think they’re coming back.”
“They’re what?”
“They’re coming back at us.”
The jeep came straight at the Americans, firing long before it was in range. What was it that drove the Japanese back into battle? Fear of retreat and defeat? Shame at having been ambushed by men on horseback? At leaving their dead co
mrades at the riverbank? Maybe it was anger. There was lots of anger that early in the war.
Harding told his men to scatter, some to one side, some to the other. All he meant to do was save them from being mowed down all at once, but what started as a safeguard turned into a strategy, a strategy in the oddest possible battle, an amalgam of every childhood game: cowboys and Indians, bullfight and bull, rodeo, polo, dodge ball, keep-away, and war. Once the Americans scattered, the Japanese spun and circled, rushing off in one direction, then the other, speeding, braking, firing wildly. How long did it last? Three minutes? Five? Ten? Jeep versus horse, wheeling around an airstrip. A rushing, milling, dusty fracas.
Harding wasn’t the best shot. That was Meade, or maybe Camper. But he was by far the best rider and that was what he did, running circles around the jeep, turning and reversing and drawing fire because he knew that’s what he was there for, and the Japanese knew it too, ignoring the others, exposing themselves, all for the sake of a shot at Harding, so that was what Harry Harding remembered of the last cavalry charge in the history of warfare was trying to avoid a jeep manned by a squad of half-naked Japanese.
Then the jeep stopped at the center of the airstrip. Tires shredded, gas leaking, steam coming out of the engine, windshield riddled with bullet holes. The driver was hunched over the wheel, another man had collapsed next to the machine gun, a third was in the front seat, and suddenly it was quiet. A trick? Draw the Americans in to point-blank range? The horsemen advanced slowly, firing as they came, one shot for every forward step.
“It’s over,” Charley Camper shouted. “Hold your fire.”
He trotted over to the jeep.
“God, is it over,” he said.
They pushed the jeep, Japanese and all, over the edge of the airstrip. It rolled down to the river, half submerging. The truck went into the river too. Harding pictured what the place had been like half an hour before, the exhilaration and delight that both sides found there. Now bodies littered the riverbank and floated in shallows. Gas, blood, oil, all leaked away.
The plane came at dusk, a low, slow, furtive biplane, more like a crop duster than a warplane. They watched it land and turn. The pilot waved impatiently, engines idling, anxious to be on his way.
“He’s not much for ceremony,” Uncle Harrison said. “For that matter, neither am I.”
“It’s okay,” Sudul said.
“But I wanted to say thank you,” Uncle Harrison continued, “which is a word I rarely use.”
“You’re welcome,” Camper said.
“Good luck,” Meade echoed.
“I’ll be back someday,” Wingfield said. “If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t be going now.”
“We know that,” Camper said.
“I hope we meet again,” Wingfield said, “when I come back.”
“We’ll be here,” Harry Roberts Harding answered.
Part Three
FAMOUS IN MANILA
CHAPTER 16
TRAVEL WRITER GRIFFIN TABBED FOR WAR YARN and POT OF GOLD FOR COLUMNIST? and—best of the bunch—MACARTHUR’S GHOST’S GHOST. Suddenly George Griffin was famous, and his fame was of the purest, airiest kind: unearned. Phone messages piled up in his box, notes were slipped under his door. People wanted to interview, meet, get to know him, one-time guerrillas, unacknowledged heroes with tips, maps, names, with stories, scars, clippings, medal problems, medical problems, visa, immigration, and pension problems. And now he was sitting in a hotel bar with Susan Hayes, waiting for Birdy Villanueva’s driver, and he had to believe that Susan, too, was part of his run of luck, the whole package of entitlement that flowed from his alliance with MacArthur’s Ghost.
“Suddenly you’re a celebrity,” she was saying, with an irony that enhanced more than diminished the fact that what she said was true.
“At least in Manila.”
“And all this happened since . . .” She stopped and laughed. “This sounds so portentous—the night we met. Sounds like a song cue.”
“Speak quietly when you say that.” Griffin pointed to where some flamenco troubadours surrounded a navy man and his date. “They’ll be over here. Quick, what’ll it be? ‘Red Necks, White Sox, Blue Ribbon Beer’?”
“Try ‘Hole in the Bottom of the Sea.’ That usually stops them. Say, Mr. Backyard Faraway, how did it go that night? Your first night out in the city where all things are possible?”
“My God,” Griffin sighed. It seemed so long ago: the beautiful soapy girl for whom Clifford Lerner had lunged and bled, Hugh Elliot’s triple fellatio, Tom Gibbins poleaxed by a long-haired angel at the Club Tennessee. “It was good you didn’t come.”
“I thought so,” she said. Griffin liked what came next, the knowing little grin, the playful and inquisitive question. “Was it any fun at all?”
“Yes and no. Sometimes. Maybe. Compared to what? I don’t know. No doctors were called for. No police. No priests. It was just . . . what you saw. A bunch of writers. Travel writers, that is. It’s a funny trade, like writing postcards for a living. The world never quite lives up to the billings you write for it. And you don’t live up to the hopes you had for yourself. So every now and then you go out and roll around in your disappointment, defile yourself, and laugh at it all.”
“Even though the joke’s on you.”
“Especially because the joke’s on you . . . Uh-oh . . . we’ve been spotted.” Griffin gestured at the musicians strolling in their direction. “Let’s go.”
Their driver pointed the car onto Roxas Boulevard. In front of the Cultural Center, workmen were assembling a seventy-foot Christmas tree, painstakingly nailing twig to branch to trunk. And, along the Boulevard, there were forests of white-painted trees for sale. Snow in Manila.
“Christmas,” Griffin said. “They really bought the whole thing, didn’t they?”
“The whole thing?”
“The American thing. Basketball. Movies. TV. Pop music. Fast food. Is there anything they’ve said no to?”
“Journalists learn fast.”
“You’ve heard this before, I gather.”
“Yes. That doesn’t mean you’re wrong.”
“But you think I am.”
“It’s sad, that’s all,” Susan Hayes said, “and I hate to hear people talk that way. They imitate us and our response is to laugh at them.”
“God, they must hate us.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I would.”
Susan Hayes turned away, looked out the window. They were well out of the center of town now, but Manila went on forever, a tide of corrugated metal, burning rubber, plastic buckets, dangling light bulbs, half-dead neon, dripping pipes, wet splotchy concrete, hanging laundry. Air that was diesel, disco, and pork. Posters for karate movies, San Mig beer, baby formulas, Ricoh watches. And people everywhere. Squatting, spitting, shitting, cooking, whistling, washing. Traffic. Traffic as in business. Traffic as in people. Traffic as in traffic. Gridlock of appetites and ambitions.
“They’ve tried hating us,” Susan Hayes said. “It wasn’t any fun.” She leaned forward and tapped the pane of plastic that separated driver from rider. “Excuse me.”
The driver had been turning up the volume gradually, front and back: Engelbert Humperdinck singing “Please Release Me.”
“Mum?”
“Could you turn it down please?”
“Yes, mum.” The partition closed, the back speakers were switched off, so that the music seemed to have withdrawn to the front seat.
“What’s he like? Your colonel?”
“I can’t say.”
“Can’t say?” She laughed and turned toward Griffin, and he glimpsed a nice combination of well-turned, muscular legs and commodious thighs: rare combination. “At the embassy, when we say we can’t say, it means we know but aren’t permitted to talk. Is that what you mean?”
“In the morning, I walk from my hotel to his. He tries to be friendly. He makes sure I’m not hungry. There’s coffee. But it’s
the kind of effort someone in a hospital makes to cheer up visitors.”
“It sounds so . . . serious.”
“To him it is.”
“And to you?”
“I’m getting there.” Now he swung around to face her, because what he was going to say was important to him and he wanted it to be important to her, but for a moment her face stopped him, and those green eyes. “He was a missionary’s son. Was? Is. He doesn’t have that faith. I don’t know how he lost it. Maybe I’ll find out. But he misses it. So—this is going to sound foolish—he comes to me . . .”
“Go ahead.”
“He doesn’t have religion. So he puts his trust in, well, me.”
“That’s a little out of your line, isn’t it?”
“A little?”
“Tonight we have a round-table, open-house town meeting,” Birdy Villanueva announced from a podium in a University of the Philippines lecture hall. That was as specific as she got. The others took it from there. A man who said he was an economist evaluated a recent official claim that the nation’s unemployment rate was a flabbergasting 4 percent. The artificially low figure had been produced by defining employment as any paid labor performed over a period of four months, watching a car, say, or selling mangos. That amused the audience. So did Birdy Villanueva’s mock-breathless account of Imelda Marcos’s upcoming film festival. Yes, she assured the audience, actor George Hamilton would be coming and the nation could sleep peacefully. Griffin was puzzled by the snickering until a fellow panelist—a priest, at that—confided that Hamilton had frequently been linked to the First Lady. Warming to his gossip, the priest bandied other names from Van Cliburn to Mick Jagger. He was tickled to have a chance to trot out old yarns. When Griffin asked whether Marcos had been accused of any matching peccadilloes, the priest breathed deep, rolled his eyes, and launched into a gorgeously detailed tale of trysts with an American B-movie actress in a famous cottage just off a Manila golf course.
