by P. F. Kluge
The missionary boy brought them to a village near the top of Mount Mariveles. It was as bad a place as Meade had ever seen: a cluster of thatch huts in a muddy clearing that the sun never reached even when it was shining, which wasn’t often because the mountains caught whatever rain was within a thousand miles of the place. It was like the clouds said, hey, Meade’s here, why waste our water on the ocean when we can run over to Bataan and piss on Meade? Hell, they lined up in holding patterns, the clouds did, like the convoy that had never come. Why was it, he wondered, the rain could reach through the trees overhead, but not the sunlight? Some shitty umbrella. Funny, though, no one else complained. Eating goats, lizards, monkeys, picking worms out of cornmeal, they were pleased as punch with their mountain hideaway. Hell, they even collected a couple of new recruits who came out of the woods, a Texan named Vernon Waters and a Virginia gent named Owen Edwards. Some piece of work, that Edwards, the upper-crust kind of guy who walks through the movies saying, “Tennis, anyone?” The first thing he did after he came in was trim his beard. He’d been on Corregidor near the end, right in the tunnel. Then he rafted over to Bataan, decided to take his chances in the boondocks. When they asked him how it went on the Rock, he said, “Oh, it was some brouhaha.”
They were waiting for things to settle down, the missionary boy said, and then, by God, he’d take them to a place that was even safer. More mountains, farther north, where they’d begun. That was a trip Meade wasn’t planning to make. He was looking for another kind of ending. And toward the end of the third week, he found it. With their move north approaching, Harding wanted to feel his way out a little, see how things were. He asked Meade if he wanted to join him on a scout.
Down from the mountain, they came into a battlefield that was way past ripe. Shells, ration cans, burnt-out jeeps and trucks. An officer who’d been tied to a tree and bayoneted, like a hunk of suet left out for birds. A field hospital, with shredded tents flapping in the wind, rain-soaked piles of used bandages composting in a corner. Some things rotted, some things rusted: nothing survived.
“Amazing how quickly nature takes things back,” Harding said, as if it were good news, spring coming on, blue skies after rain. Meade didn’t respond.
They wanted to see what kind of traffic was on the coast road. Edwards had told them the Japs had marched forty thousand sick and starving prisoners north along the road, shooting or bayoneting anyone who lagged behind. But now the road was almost empty. They paralleled it for an hour and only a half dozen vehicles passed, trucks piled high with surrendered rifles, canteens, tires: personal effects of an army that died. Then Meade spotted something down the road, a parade, a ceremony, an accident, he couldn’t say. Coming closer, they still couldn’t tell what was going on. From the edge of the jungle, on a slope a couple of hundred yards above the road, they saw several hundred American soldiers and a handful of Japanese. The Japanese were armed, all right. But so were the Americans!
“Christ almighty!” Meade exulted. “Could it be?”
“I’m not so sure.”
“What it looks like to me. It’s the landing, the convoy!”
“I hope you’re right,” said Harding.
“Hope? I don’t get you, missionary boy. Sounds like you don’t hardly want the fleet to come. I don’t get you. Not from the day I saw you. That night we had girls over the officers club, paid for and delivered, you walked away. There’s a war on, you walk away again. You’re always wanting to walk away. Anybody wants to come with you, that’s okay, but if they don’t, that’s okay too. I don’t get you.”
“Do me a favor, Meade. Just wait a minute.”
A minute was all it took for the scene to sort itself out. For it was a scene, a scene straight out of a movie, a Japanese movie, newsreel footage reconstructing the conquest of Bataan. The Americans filed past the back of a truck, where they were handed rifles. Helmets and canteens came out of other trucks. But what used to be weapons and uniforms were props and costumes now. A camera truck came into view, a Jap director shouting orders through a megaphone as the camera panned over the dispirited Americans. The Americans surrendered again, a second time, a third, from a distance and close up, in twos and threes and by the hundreds. They surrendered on request. They were at it an hour or so, and they were still surrendering.
“Don’t try and stop me,” Meade said suddenly. He’d gotten up and started backing away from Harding toward the jungle.
“Where are you going, Meade?”
“Stick around and see,” he said. “Don’t stop me, don’t even try. You can’t stop me.”
“What are you going to do?” Harding asked, but in his heart he knew. And he wouldn’t try to stop him. Meade was doing something that Harding had always insisted on his own right to do. He was walking away.
The film crew had almost finished. The Americans had surrendered a dozen times and the Japanese accepted, sternly, nobly, firmly. That was how history got recorded, if you left it to the winners. Which you always did. Now they were setting up for the finale. Three Japs clambered on top of a burned-out tank, set to wave flags, hats, rifles, and lead a victory chant: “Banzai, Banzai!” First they shot it from a distance, the prisoners standing while the victors whooped it up. Then the prisoners sat down while the camera moved in for a close-up: Banzai, Banzai! The prisoners were extras now, the trio of Japanese on top of the tank were stars. Banzai! Banzai! It was the last sound they ever made. Three shots tore into them, blowing two of them backward, off the top of the tank, spinning the third around and pitching him into the captive audience below.
It happened so suddenly, so stunningly, there followed a moment of silence, a tiny wondering vacuum before all hell broke loose and in that while you could hear a shout. Mean Meade, right at the water’s edge, shouting, “MacArthur’s Ghosts! MacArthur’s Ghosts!” He was knee deep, wading forward, firing and shouting. Meade had transformed himself. He’d become what he’d hoped for, the rescue, the mile-long convoy, the promised return. Already wounded, he stood on the beach, waving to the scared, dumbfounded prisoners, waving merrily, come on in, the water’s fine. As the shots came back at him, he went down slowly, to his knees, then up again. He fell backward, floating in the shallows, only moving with the waves, as needless bullets splashed around him.
CHAPTER 27
“Pigs, pigs, pigs!” Forty miles from where Meade had died, forty years later, Charley Camper leaned against a pen fenced by slabs of corrugated metal roofing and called his livestock. Griffin and Harding had arrived in the late afternoon. While Harding was napping, Charley offered Griffin a tour. “Pigs, pigs, pigs!” Right out of the Ozarks, the call came from deep in his chest, part grunt, part squeal, part serenade.
“See how red their backs are?” Camper asked. “Suckers get sunburned. I got to rub my darlings down with coconut oil. They love me. Bet you didn’t know that.”
“Daddy!” One of Charley’s daughters ran up with a handful of corn husks. Griffin didn’t have the arithmetic of Charley’s family down yet—hadn’t even seen his wife—but this girl was younger than the teenagers he had seen at the Manila Hotel. She squealed with delight as she tossed the husks to the pigs. “Peeks, peeks, peeks!”
“I got chickens, too,” Charley said. “Free-ranging chickens, as you can probably tell from the bottoms of your shoes. You ever taste a chicken that hasn’t been caged, force-fed, doped up, and kept awake all its life, which is maybe three weeks?”
“I can’t say that I have.”
“Well, you will tonight. I been marinating a bunch since yesterday, got ‘em floating in soy sauce, lemon juice, hot chili peppers. You’ll see. Come on, I got something else to show you.”
Charley Camper’s farm was a collection of trucks, huts, kids, appliances, toys, and sheds perched on a bluff overlooking Subic Bay. Camper and his brood lived in a pair of World War II vintage Quonset huts, dumpy functional half shells of sheet metal that sat on concrete slabs. There’d been thousands of them right after the war. Now t
hey were an endangered species, Camper said.
“Here we are,” Charley said when they came to the edge of his property. “This is my spot.” A pair of hammocks, a couple of automobile seats, an oil-cloth-covered card table with some folding chairs, a horseshoe pit, a barbecue. A series of extension cords feeding an overhead light bulb, a prewar cathedral-style radio, and a refrigerator that was covered with Playboy centerfolds Griffin remembered from college days.
“Check out the view,” Camper said. He was down on his knees, pouring a bushel of coconut-shell charcoal into a barbecue that consisted of a sheet of the ubiquitous corrugated metal straddling a couple of cement blocks. Griffin could see the broad sweep of the harbor that Harding and his men had once crept past in the rain. He saw the American naval base barracks and lawns, houses and offices and baseball fields, a kempt and orderly world. Next to it, the lights, cranes, wharves, and dry-docks of the ship repair facility. And pressing against the base, the bright lights of Olangapo.
“Three hundred nightclubs, eight thousand licensed prostitutes,” Camper said, coming up with a couple of San Miguel beers. “This here’s Sodom. Angeles City—that’s near Clark Field—is Gomorrah.”
“Get into town much?”
“Not like I used to.” He pointed Griffin toward one hammock, parked himself in another. The whole scene was a cartoon, the life of Riley. Beer in the refrigerator, chicken about to land on the grill. And down below . . .
“More women than . . .”
“What’s that?” Camper asked.
“I was just thinking . . .”
“More women than you can shake a stick at? That what you were thinking? Well, you can say that again. I shook my stick at quite a few.”
“Did you always pay for it?”
“You always pay for it, one way or another.” Charley turned in the hammock to face Harding. He had the kind of body that big hammocks told stories to little hammocks about when they wanted to frighten them. His stomach pressed against each space in the rope, like a prisoner peeking through jail bars. “I guess I sound like some red-neck ignoramus, but the way I see it, the trouble is when you don’t pay. Too many people running around trying to get stuff for free.”
“What about your wife?”
“She’s the exception,” Camper said, “that proves the rule. I met her down there, in one of the honky-tonks. We been together for twenty years. We got family here. Lot less than before. They ship out to California. ‘Make business in the U.S.A.’ A dozen already, riding on my tickets and my passport. My wife’s over there. Damn near lives there now.”
“What made her different from all the other girls? Your wife?”
Charley laughed. “You asked the wrong question. You got it back assward.”
“How’s that?”
“My wife’s beautiful. Was. Is. Always will be. She has it all. Take my word for it. Well, look at me. What you see is what she got. You think that I was ever handsome?”
He raised himself out of the hammock, broke wind, and walked toward the refrigerator for another pair of beers.
“I believe I see the colonel coming out,” he said when he came back. He stood over Griffin, scratching his belly. “What I’m saying is, that night we met, her and me, she wasn’t the one who got lucky. It was me. So you shouldn’t be asking me what was different about her. You should be asking her what was different about me.”
“I’d like to meet her,” Griffin said.
“Well, that’s a problem. She loves California. She just got a real estate license, can you believe it . . .”
The big man stood there, still running his hand over his gut, as though he’d eaten something that was bothering him.
“Twentieth Century Fox she works for. Servicing the Filipino fat cats who are taking money out of this country by the planeload. Putting it in condos.”
“Twentieth Century is a movie company.”
“Wait a minute . . . Century Twenty-one. She wears a yellow blazer. When we got together, I figured we’d stay forever. Me and my local girl. I thought she was the end of my traveling, but I was just the beginning of hers. Sometimes it feels like we were headed in separate directions all along, only I didn’t know it.”
“What about your daughters?”
“California girls,” Charley answered.
That night, after they’d feasted on Charley’s chickens, a whole bird each, and killed the first case of San Miguel beers, Charley rang a cowbell and one of his daughters came out with a pot of coffee and a bottle of Irish whiskey. Another ring produced a box of Manila cigars. They talked the sort of talk that passes between men who like each other enormously, who sense more than they actually know about each other and feel more than they can say. Inadequate talk, by some standards. Politics, sports, travel, food. And memories. They traded in memories, which blew around them like cigar smoke, lingered in the mouth like coffee and whiskey, shone and guttered like the neon in Olongapo, and stretched out, dark and endless, like the South China Sea.
“Charley,” Harding said. “I have a favor to ask.”
“Anything you say, Colonel. You know that.”
“I want you to tell a story. Not a story . . . the story. Just a piece of it.”
“What piece would that be?”
“Moving out of Bataan, after Meade died. Start there.”
Camper cast a vast, sad sigh. His arms folded in back of his neck, his stomach heaved, and he stared up at the stars. “I got to wonder how much of this matters. I really do.”
“It matters to me.”
“Well . . .” Charley heaved himself out of the hammock, stood, stretched, paced. He rubbed his stomach as thoughtfully as a scholar ever stroked his beard. He belched as though to clear his throat. At the last moment, he grabbed a beer, tilted it back over his throat the way a mechanic feeds a can of oil into an engine that’s starting to smoke. Then he began . . .
“MacArthur’s Ghosts. The Japs talked about us on the radio. Sometimes they laughed about us. They liked the idea that all we were was ghosts. Then they took us serious and started hunting. Some villages we came into, they were scared to death of us. Others, things were queer and slow and just didn’t feel right. Even though there’s smiles all around and food cooking, it’s not right. More than once, we just looked at each other and ran. We were real skittish. There was one place we got a warm welcome, a house for each of us, and we could hear them murdering a pig in our honor, and some women made us take off our clothes, which they proceeded to slap to death in a nearby stream and Polshanski—him of all people, down to his underwear—starts getting fidgety. Something was wrong, something he couldn’t put his finger on, but he didn’t like it and pretty soon none of us likes it and then we see a bunch of men coming down a lane, not Japanese, but Filipinos, at least ten of them, cops we thought. Well, we couldn’t count on cops to be on our side. We ran out of the houses, guns and underwear was all we had, we splashed out into the rice fields, right past the women who were washing our clothes. What a bunch we were, like kids caught swimming in a posted lake. Finally Sudul looks around, tells us to stop, because that bunch of cops we worried about were at the edge of the village, waving to us, and when their waves don’t bring us back, they break out their instruments and start playing music—`Oh, Shenandoah’ I think it was. They were a village band, coming to serenade us in our hour of defeat. And now we waded back in, trying to act dignified, like maybe this was a drill or something.
“We were sneaking through Pampangas, the rice country, low and wet and flat. We moved at night, walked, swam, waded. Days we hid out in the fields, unless we’d found a good village. We were in bad shape now. Insects, leeches, rashes, burns, infections. I was rotting from the inside out and outside in, and I figured that when what bothered me on the outside, molds and sores and all, met up with what was hurting me on the inside, diarrhea and fever, well, that would be like two armies shaking hands over a mutual foe. Me. I’d be dead. No great loss. . . . Well, we had this Filipino boy w
ith us, he’d been a cadet at Baguio and he’d fought down on Bataan. His name. Let me think. I’m real bad at names . . .”
“We called him Connie,” Harding prompted.
“That’s right!” Camper said, snapping his fingers as though he’d just remembered. “Connie it was. A bright boy, a real go-getter. He was the one we counted on to sniff out the situation in the villages. And we started talking about the villages like they were women. It started simple. If a village looked good, Connie would say, the girl is willing. If Japs were there, he’d say, the woman is married. If it was shaky, one way or another, he’d say the woman is married and her husband is away on business. But then, it got more and more elaborate. We made a game out of it. Instead of a village being a good woman, she’d be a ripe young virgin, and a bad village would be an old hag having her last period, and an iffy village would be a horny, insatiable slut, anxious to meet us after dark. Jokes were all we had. And then, deep in Pampangas, the joke was on us.”
Charley walked as he talked, pacing back and forth inside a cage of memories. Now he wanted Harding to let him out.
“That’s it,” he said.
“No, it’s not.”
“You want me to keep going?”
“Yes.”
“Do I have to?”
“I can’t make you do anything, Charley,” Harding granted. “But yes . . .”
“We were actually getting someplace, moving across them watery plains. Up north we could see Mount Arayat setting there all by itself, heaving up out of the rice fields and swamps and fish ponds, it was almost like an island. What’s more, Connie heard there were guerrillas on that mountain, real hard boys, organized and fighting, so we had reason to believe that if we got to that mountain, it wouldn’t disappoint us. And every day, it got a little closer, a mirage that turned into a silhouette and then into a real green peak, with cane fields on its lower slopes, and rain forests higher up, and clouds stuck round the top. Mount Arayat. Sudul turned it into Ararat, where Moses landed in his ark after forty days and nights of rain . . .”
