by P. F. Kluge
CHAPTER 22
Three weeks later, Harding kept the promise he’d made in the bell tower. During that time, he had assumed command of MacArthur’s Ghosts. It was nothing that was said or done, nothing acknowledged, but from the moment he’d promised he had a plan, he was in command. He kept the others at the hideout while he went into Baguio alone. He didn’t confide. That was part of being a leader: setting himself off from the others. Biding his time.
“Tonight’s the night,” he said.
“You mean . . .”
“We get even tonight,” Harding said. “Maybe we get ahead.”
“I’m game,” said Meade. “We’ve been waiting long enough.”
He hefted his crotch as he spoke: as though Harding had offered him a woman. Maybe, for people like Meade, there was a connection between the act of killing and the act of love, all his energy converging on a weapon, pointing at a target, a duality that came out in the double meaning of the four-letter word Harding still couldn’t bring himself to say.
The Pines Hotel was the grandest place in the islands, a sprawling white hotel that might have sat among the Rockies or the Adirondacks. It was a place for rich people and it was no accident that the place survived the Japanese bombing. Anyone who ruled the islands would come to esteem such gardens and golf courses, wrap-around porches with rockers and easy chairs, endless carpeted corridors and rooms with views.
The Americans waited in a grove of acacia at the edge of the golf course, just beyond a sand trap. They watched cars and jeeps pull up the curving driveway, deposit guests at the foyer. Sometimes people laughed as they took the driveway speed bumps a little too fast. Then the headlights jumped up and down over the trees in which MacArthur’s Ghosts were hiding.
“Where’s the loyalty?” Meade asked. “I don’t understand those people.”
“You expect the whole country to go into mourning because you got your butt kicked?” Polshanski asked.
“Those people, the Filipinos, what do they believe in? Do they believe in anything?”
“They believe in living.”
“Well, I’ve got news. Those people are traitors. And the penalty for treason is death. Am I right?”
“Oh, shit,” Polshanski sighed. “I give up.”
“Am I right?”
“Like the clock that’s broken, you’re right.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Twice a day.”
“That’s good enough for me,” Meade said.
Now even the fashionably late had arrived. The dance floor was crowded, and those who declined to dance emptied tray after tray of drinks. Along the serving table, a couple of roast pigs had been ravaged. Some of the chafing dishes were empty, with covering lids turned upside down.
“All right,” Harding said. Meade and Camper trotted quietly toward the front of the hotel, the curving driveway, domain of doormen and chauffeurs, aides and orderlies, more people outside than in. That was something you noticed in the islands. Whenever someone was working or playing hard, he was bound to draw a crowd.
“Spread out,” Harding said. Polshanski moved ten yards to one side, Sudul ten yards to the other. They rode across the grass, toward the back of the patio. The music reached out and invited them in. And the smell of food. Now they were a hundred yards away and still no one had seen them. Two dozen couples on the dance floor turning to music, twenty-four faces revolving before them, forty-eight eyes, yet none noticed three spectral figures, men on horseback, moving forward, raising their rifles.
“Ready?” Harding asked. Harding found a Japanese officer at the edge of the dance floor, cocktail in hand, aide or translator at his side, chatting convivially with a white-suited Filipino. The three men fired at once, and kept firing. Harding’s officer spun around and toppled across a hedge at the side of the patio. The band dove for cover, dancers lay on the floor, hiding under tables. And now they could hear the commotion from out front, where Meade and Camper greeted the Japanese who rushed out to the parking lot. Then they heard a scream, not of pain, but of sheer exultation, and they knew it was Meade.
“Let’s go around front,” Harding said. At the entrance, Japanese sprawled in the foyer, lay across the front steps. Meade and Camper were still firing, but the Japanese reacted quickly, returning fire, so that the Americans had to pull back into the pines.
“That’s it!” Harding shouted. Camper was ready enough to go, but Meade acted as if he hadn’t heard.
“Meade! Come on!”
Some of the Japanese had gotten into jeeps and cars. Engines started, headlights switched on. They were coming toward them across the parking lot.
“Come on!”
“MacArthur’s Ghosts!” Like a cowboy actor, Meade reared up on his horse, came down, and spurred the beast across the parking lot. He galloped to the side of the hotel, raked the verandah, shattering windows and chandeliers. He blew a drum off the bandstand, riddled some chafing dishes. Coming back, he rode down a Japanese who had wandered, dazed and wounded, out onto the grass. “MacArthur’s Ghosts!”
That night, they knew what it was like to be hunted. By the time they got back to the ridge, the country behind them, every road and path, had lights moving on it, jeeps, trucks, flashlights, lanterns. And what surprised them, even Harding, was how good it felt. They were burning lights, they were staying up late in Baguio, they were breaking out weapons and organizing patrols, posting guards and poring over maps, all because of what MacArthur’s Ghosts had done.
“We can’t stay here,” Harding said. “They’re coming into the mountains. They’ll follow us here.”
“Where do we go?” asked Sudul.
“We’ll have to leave the horses, take what we can carry . . .”
“Leave the horses?” There was real grievance in Meade’s voice. He could have buried any one of them with less emotion.
“They can’t help us where we’re going,” Harding said. “They’ll leave a trail. They’ll slow us down. They’ll die.”
“Where the hell are you taking us? I’m not so sure I like the sound of it.”
“Farther up into the mountains. All the way across, almost, and then up north, to the Kalingas . . .”
“The what?”
“A tribe of mountain people my father used to visit. They’ll let us stay as long as we want. It’s safe there. If anybody’s coming, they know it hours ahead . . .”
“To hell with that,” Meade said.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t like the sound of it.”
“You don’t?”
“No.”
“Then stay.”
“What?”
“Simple. Stay. Keep the horses. Keep them all. I’m going. Ten minutes from now, I’m gone.”
Harding had known there’d be a confrontation with Meade, sooner or later. Now that it had come, he was surprised at how well he’d managed. He went to the back of the cave, picking among the boxes they had stored against the wall, ammunition, first-aid kits, canned goods. Then he waited outside to give them time—not much time—to talk it over. Down below, a pool of light dispersed into the pine forest: every now and then you could see a glint among the trees. The hunt was on. This was what the others had wanted. Now it was up to them. He could be alone or he could be part of them. I, we, or they: it was up to them.
“Harry?” It was Polshanski, alone, the sad-eyed and knowing Polshanski.
“So?”
“It’s this way. If these mountains of yours were an island and we got shipwrecked here, we’d say fine. Here we stay. We’ll make out. Sooner or later, someone’ll pick us up. Understand?”
“Sure.”
“But this is different. Because there’s thousands of men fighting a war down south. And the ground we’re standing on is connected to the ground that they’re standing on down there. The same island, see. And we want to stand—or fall—with them. Meade, in there? He’s crying. He says he doesn’t want to die in the woods like an animal. He
doesn’t want to crawl in a hole someplace. No one knowing whether he lived, where he died. The fact is, most of us feel that way. What we want to do is try and see if we can get through to where the others are . . .”
“You want to go—”
“Hold it. There’s more. We want you to take us. Everybody agrees on that.”
“You want me to take you—”
“To Bataan.”
CHAPTER 23
It was the noblest of enterprises and the most foolish. An epic campaign or a dumb little foray, a long march or a wild goose chase. It was a handful of men playing a joke on history and history going them one better. They risked everything for nothing. They rushed to the scene of America’s greatest defeat.
That, said Harding, was the short version and maybe the best. But along the way there were things to remember, small things along the road to nowhere in the wrong direction, but you didn’t forget them. How he had led them farther into the mountains, brushing Japanese patrols and Filipino police who were working with the Japanese. How they’d thrown themselves down at the edge of a trail and stared at the boots of the men who hunted them. Or awakened in the night and seen lights moving toward them, realizing that the enemy had been moving while they’d been resting. Or cowered inside a worked-out mine shaft among rotten wood, mud and puddles, feeling they’d already been buried a long time, that the sides of a coffin had fallen away and the earth itself had swallowed them. The mine —Baguio Number Seven—was choked with lumber, rusted roofing, all left behind to deflect interest in the treasure Uncle Harrison had stashed inside: boxes, crates, suitcases, dishes, and furniture that waited forlornly for their owners to return.
“What’d you bring us back here for?” asked Sudul. He felt uncomfortable in the storage cave: it was like desecrating a grave. Chairs and sofas covered with sheets, dead people’s clothing hanging from pipes, toys and china and God knows what along the wall.
“You walked right past it,” Harding said. In a secondary tunnel off the main shaft, a dark bulky shape lay draped in canvas. “Come on. I need some help.”
“That’s someone’s car in there,” Meade said. “That car belongs to—”
“Harrison Wingfield. We’re taking it to Bataan. We’ll start at night. And every hour we make, every mile is a mile we don’t have to walk. Or run. If we get one hour that’s forty miles. Two days of walking. Two days we might get killed.”
“The Japanese . . .”
“The Japanese are looking for us already. On trails. Around mills, mines, logging camps. But not on the south highway.”
“I think I like it,” Meade said. “I like it fine.”
“You drive.”
It took an hour to get the white Packard out of the tunnel, and almost as long again to replace enough debris so that the entrance was again blocked, but at the end came another one of those moments that stayed with you: the white roadster in a clearing in front of the mine shaft. Pine trees and brush around them and in front, the dirt road that led out of the mountains. Harding remembered what Polshanski had said, that they weren’t on an island, shipwrecked, waiting for rescue from over the horizon. There was a war out there and this dirt road, this shiny white car, was going to take them there. The land they stood on was the land that was being fought on: it all connected. And this funny moment was a piece of forever.
“Well, gents . . .” Harding said. Meade was already behind the wheel, but the others waited for Harding to decide where he wanted to sit. He sat in back, directly behind Meade.
“All aboard,” he said. And then, to Meade, “To Bataan. Better make it snappy.”
South of Baguio they neared the main highway. It was night now, and they could see headlights coming up Kennon Road toward the summer capital. They were headed the other way, south toward Rosario, then west toward Lingayen, then south as far as they could get, along the coast of the South China Sea.
“How do you want me to do this?” asked Meade. “Fast? Slow?”
“Just normal to start with,” Harding said. “But don’t let anybody pass us from behind. A car comes toward us, give them high beams and the horn, like it’s an emergency, we’re on our way to the scene of an accident.”
“Which we are,” Polshanski said.
“Which we are,” Harding repeated.
Even at night, they could tell when they’d come into the lowlands, the rice bowl provinces of central Luzon. They had the greenhouse heat to tell them, the smell of mud just off the road, an elemental heaviness in the air, shallow ponds of water that stretched off on both sides of the road so that rare farmhouses—nipa huts surrounded by bamboo thickets—were like so many islands in a dark sea. The villages they passed through were small, lost places, shuttered and deserted, that wanted to know nothing of what came along the road. In the first hour they passed a half dozen vehicles. They used high beams and horns to good effect. Sometimes they heard a squeal of brakes behind them, a belated horn, an inaudible curse. That was all the opposition they had. The first hour was fun, all the exhilaration of a college joy ride in a borrowed car. It felt as though they were getting away with something and that even if they were stopped at the next crossing, they would have this to remember, every mile a victory.
Around Lingayen there was trouble. Lingayen was where the Japanese had landed, coming in off the gulf, brushing aside Wainwright’s opposition, sweeping on toward Manila. It had been over fast around Lingayen, and it had been over for weeks, but you could tell that the war had passed. There were barrios that had been fought over, concrete walls reduced to rubble, corrugated roofs crumpled like waste paper, burned-out tanks along the road, jeeps upended in the river, tires facing skyward like drowned animals’ paws.
The trouble at Lingayen was the bridge. The main bridge had been blown by the retreating Americans, then partially repaired by the Japanese: one lane only, one-way traffic, a sentry at either end, a sentry who was nothing more than a traffic cop. It was a meaningless post, far behind the lines, deep in the middle of the night. But those sentries meant that this river was a Rubicon.
They came forward slowly, up a ramp that fed onto the main span. There were three sentries, and the sentries saw the car coming, the improbable car, which turned them into gaping yokels. One sentry was peering into the high beams when Camper shot him in the face. Sudul caught another in the back as he dove for a field telephone. The third went running ahead across the bridge. Blinking headlights high and low, blaring horn, they went racketing across the wooden planking. The white roadster must have looked like an angry bull plunging out of a rodeo chute. Surprise was gone, but astonishment remained: it was hard for the Japanese to believe any of this. They fired indiscriminately at the car. One of them lowered a little candy-striped barrier: it snapped like a dry twig against the roadster’s windshield.
A bullet or two must have found the muffler, for suddenly they were backfiring and belching as they roared through the empty streets of Lingayen, a plaza in the old Spanish quarter, then down toward the sea, the American zone, a blur of pillars and mansions, and finally the sea. Mud flats and nipa palms on one side, a long sandy beach on the other, and the Japanese behind them, no doubt about it now, three or four pursuing vehicles. For a while, the Americans thought they could lose them. Surely a Packard roadster could out-speed any military transport. But the road was an equalizer, all potholes and puddles, washboards and ravines, dust on high ground, troughs of mud in low spots. The road was made for jeeps. The angry cloud of dust and light behind them was catching up.
“Stop,” Harding said. “Kill the headlights.”
They were right at the edge of the sea. The beach was flat, gravelly, endless.
“From here on, we walk,” Harding said.
“What about the car?” Meade asked. “I hate to leave it.”
“You’ve got two minutes,” Harding said.
Harding had expected Meade to riddle the Packard with bullets, or possibly burn it. But Meade jumped back behind the wheel, gunned the
engine, lurched off the road down onto the beach. He floundered through the soft sand, but at the water’s edge he found a hard-packed gravelly surface. He waved merrily, sped off down south, wheeled around, raced back toward them and, at the last minute, like a football player turning into a line of tackles, he took the Packard into the waves. He got farther than you might think, a hundred feet or so, before everything stopped. Meade whooped, jumped out, dove off the hood, swam, then waded back toward them. Behind them, the roadster looked like a landing craft, its dying headlights shining out to sea.
“That was fun,” Meade said.
They darted across the road into the nipa swamp. This was a place they’d never been. Mud that sucked and slurped, tugged and held and coated you. Branches that speared and slashed as you passed. After the nipa palms they came into rice fields, sliding on narrow dikes that were buttressed by thorns and sharpened sticks, and the smells made you feel the world was a puddle of piss in a field of shit. All the time, they worried they were going too slowly. They slogged through rice paddies, waded through fish ponds, punched through fields of sugarcane, never knowing what the next thing would be, or when they’d be through it, and once, from far behind them, they heard some shots. Maybe the Japanese had shot at each other. That would be easy enough. The only thing was to keep moving and see what the world looked like in the morning.
