by P. F. Kluge
“It was Noah,” Harding said.
“What?”
“Noah and the ark,” Harding said. “It was Noah.”
“Said I was bad on names,” Camper responded. “Anyway, we came into a nice little village, and I’ll never know whether they betrayed us on purpose or whether that’s just where our luck ran out. I could find the place today, I could find it easy, because I remember the church where we hid out. I remember the cool of the cement floor and the way the wood smelled, just like the top of your desk when you took a nap in kindy-garden, and the plate glass window, all bright colors. I got it memorized, that church, so I guess I could go back and ask, ask the old people, whether they meant that we should die. I could ask. Trouble is, I don’t know what I want to hear—that it happened on purpose or that it happened by accident. Because either one would break my heart.
“A nice little village. Or, as Connie put it, young virgin, fourteen and ripe. A neat little schoolhouse, and nipa huts, and a white-painted Catholic church. Flowers everywhere, and dogs and kids and chickens and wash draped over the tops of bushes. We came in at dusk when the men came in from the fields, as if we’d all been working out there together and now we were home. That evening we sat out on the square, the way folk do in small towns, and we talked. I liked that feeling. Kerosene lights coming on in houses and wood fires and cooking smells. Music from an old hand-cranked Victrola. And us just sitting there, like we really belonged. They knew about the Japs, they’d seen them moving on the main roads. But no one had come into the village yet. It was like prewar. Polshanski said maybe that was the best way to get through a war, to be an unimportant person in an unimportant place. Anyway we felt good. There was only one road that led to the village, and a bridge on that road was washed out and the villagers were in no rush to repair it.
“We were sleeping in the church, stretched out on mats they’d given us. Some of us were in the open area, the foyer, near the front door. Others had tucked themselves in between the pews. About a dozen of us, I’d say. I was the only one awake when it happened. I’d just stepped out to pee and I caught that first little hint that dawn was coming on, which isn’t sunrise, isn’t even false dawn. It’s like the darkness gets diluted, it thins out some, and there’s a little breeze starts stirring round the square, and a ripple out on the rice fields, and in the swamps you can hear the reeds rustling. Dogs get up and stretch and flop back down, and it’s that time when old men like myself wake up and lie in bed with their eyes open, knowing they’ve gotten all the sleep they’re going to get, and young men—young the way I used to be—wake up hard and try to score that last piece of ass, before the night turns into morning. Maybe that’s what our friend Connie was doing, somewhere in the village. All I know is I was back inside the church, looking up at the colored glass windows, wondering if I could put my finger right on the second when the first light hit the glass, the first little glow, and suddenly Connie slams the doors open, rushes in, and shouts that there’s a patrol of Japs coming into the village, and there’s no doubt about it this time, I can see them through the door, running down the road, breaking into two groups as they hit the village square. Ten already and more coming. This is no damn patrol. It’s an attack.
“I grabbed my rifle, ducked behind the door, and started firing into the square. Some of the others followed me. They’re all awake now. How could they not be? The Japs are firing at the church, the doors, the windows. That same window I was studying, a shepherd and his flock, shattered on the floor. A piece caught Polshanski in the cheek. ‘Had to be,’ he says, ‘had to be.’ With him, everything had to be, but just this once, I asked why. `It was so nice here,’ he says. Like that explained it.
“It was odd, what happened next. The firing stopped. And for a little while, it looked like a normal day in a small village. It got light and bright, like every morning. It got hot. A dog trotted across the square, sniffed at one of the dead Japanese, just sniffed and went about his regular morning business. Now . . .”
Charley Camper took a deep breath, glanced at Harding, walked to the edge of the terrace. Down below, the neon lights of Olongapo pulsed and glimmered. Fog was coming off the bay now, so the lights glittered and guttered according to the winds. From in back, out of the Quonset where Charley’s daughters lived—”the girls’ dorm,” he called it—came the sound of the Eagles singing “One of These Nights.” Sometimes it felt that all of this was meant to show how long ago it all was, how old Harding and Charley had gotten. A couple of old soldiers sitting on a hill, with party lights spread out below. And then you saw the look on Charley Camper’s face when he came back to his story and you knew you were wrong. It was only yesterday.
“. . . in the middle of the morning, we hear a commotion out in the square. We crack the church doors and see about thirty villagers, men, women, and children marching toward the church, shielding the Japanese, who are walking right behind them, and the people were saying, ‘Don’t shoot, Joe, don’t shoot.’ They were begging, praying, crying, crossing themselves, it looks like a religious procession, a baptism maybe. Baptism to fire. And one of our men, Edwards it was, says he saw this before on the Agno River and Harding asks what they did and Edwards says they opened fire, that it wasn’t pretty, but at least he lived to tell us about it. ‘That’s great,’ Sudul says, ‘just great, thanks a lot and glad you made it.’ The Filipinos are fifty feet in front of the church now, with the Japs right behind them. One of the Filipinos—a nice old man we’d sat out with the night before—shouts we should surrender, that way no one gets killed, not them, not us. Edwards says we don’t have a choice and then the missionary boy gets a look on his face. ‘Shoot them all and God will sort it out, that it?’ Poor Edwards doesn’t know what to say. The missionary boy says, ‘Shit.’ He sends the whole bunch of us to the other end of the church, back of the altar. Only two of us are by the front door, down on the floor, rifles pointed out at the local parish. Jesus, it felt like I was on a firing squad. Him and me.
“When the men in back are ready to run for it, Polshanski gives us the signal. The sign of the cross. Can you believe it? Like he was forgiving us for what we were about to do. Then he and the rest go rushing out into the rice fields, like some marines rushing down the ramp of an LST. As they go out, the colonel and me open up on the Japs and Filipinos who were standing outside the church. That’s what the hell we did.”
Camper stopped and watched Griffin’s reaction to the confession. What did he expect? It was one of those moments. If you were taping you’d switch off the machine. If you were taking notes you’d stop writing. But you wouldn’t need your notes or tape. You’d remember anyway.
“We aimed low, at the ground in front of them, and as soon as we fired there was panic. They threw themselves on the ground or screamed and ducked for cover, Japs and Filipinos both. Then we scooted out the back door and followed the others out into the fields.”
Griffin was relieved. “Jesus, you really had me there, you two. You had me going. I need a beer.”
“Go have your beer,” Charley Camper said. “But we ain’t through yet . . .”
“It ought to be the ending. Another getaway in the nick of time. Only we didn’t get away. We ran through the rice fields, going as fast as we could. They were firing at us from the church. Know something? You get a queer feeling in your back, when you know that someone behind you is aiming at it. You feel an urge to turn around and face them. You want to see it coming, whatever it is. It’s like the animal in you wants to run as hard as it can, putting space between you and the barrel of the gun. But the human wants to turn around and look. Well, at the start the animal’s the boss. I ran and, let me tell you, running through a rice field that time of year was like trying to hop through fresh cement, but you tell yourself every inch is an inch more that a bullet has to travel, an inch harder shot for the Japs to make, you tell yourself that as long as you can. Then someone inside says, oh, the hell with it, I want to see what’s going on. I turned and I s
aw the Japanese standing right behind the church, Japs and Filipinos together, not shooting, not chasing, just standing like spectators at some kind of a sporting event, maybe a turkey shoot, and I saw three or four men who’d been shot the way I was afraid I’d be shot, shot while they were running. Now they were stretched out in mud and muddy water, not floating, not sinking, not moving. I stood right next to Owen Edwards, him with the fancy manners and the ten-dollar words. We must have run out of breath at the same time. It was about all we had in common, that and the fact we were puzzled the Japs weren’t after us.
“ ‘I don’t get it,’ I said. Just then there’s a shot, not from in back, but in front, where the rice gave way to sugarcane, and the shot gets Edwards in the stomach. He spins around, a full circle, looks at me and he says, ‘I got it.’ His hand is against his stomach, blood coming through his fingers. He holds his hand there and folds forward, so it looks like he’s taking a bow. Then he sits down in the mud. ‘Don’t let me keep you,’ he says. He died then.
“No wonder the Japanese hadn’t chased us. No wonder they stood and watched us run. They’d flushed us like a flock of ducks. More Japs were waiting for us, hidden at the edge of the cane field, like hunters in a blind, and when we got close they cut us down.
“I lifted my head and tried to make out what was left of us. It wasn’t easy because we were all down in the mud, lying flat. At a glance, you couldn’t tell the living from the dead. Then I see something slithering toward me, a human mud worm, and it’s Connie, the Filipino boy I told you about. He tells me the idea is not to move, not to move at all, but be ready to fire when the Japs come out of the cane field, which they were going to have to do because if I couldn’t tell the living from the dead, neither could they. Sooner or later, they’d come out to finish the job. They’d wait, but sooner or later they’d come.
“I remember. I remember watching that cane field. One minute it was a green hedge, waving in the wind, next minute out pops a Japanese soldier, scared as shit. He was expendable and he sure as hell expected to be expended. He’s crouching down real low, the way a baseball player crouches when he wants to cut down the strike zone. Nothing happens, out comes another, then another, a dozen of ‘em in all, and the last of them, an officer, steps a couple feet out into the rice field and sights around. What he sees is a bunch of muddy bodies ready for burial, some half buried already. I can see he’s suspicious. Maybe his men were good. Maybe they were better than good, maybe they were lucky. But how good and lucky would they have to be for them to have gotten all of us, each and every one? No one firing, no one running, no one moaning, it was queer. He drew a sword and he ordered his men to fix bayonets. It was harvest time all right, and these were the grim reapers. The officer moved toward the nearest body. He nudged it with his boot, tried to turn it over, but dead weight in mud don’t flip over easy. I saw him draw a pistol and shoot into the body. Nothing happened. He stepped over to the next body, same time as he waved the other Japs into the field. He holstered his pistol, raised up his sword, and I remember thinking, maybe he’s right, maybe we are all dead, and I saw the sword go up in the air, and stay there, glinting in the sun, and stay and hesitate, and wave crazy-like, side to side, because the dead body had sprung up out of the mud and jammed a knife in the officer’s stomach. It was our missionary boy, come back to life, the same time a half dozen others of us open up, me last of all, but I had time to pick off a Jap who tried running back into the sugarcane. Oh, that was something, that was really something, it was the kind of comeback we’d been wanting since Bataan, getting up off our stomachs and making them run. ‘Mean’ Meade would have loved it.
“It was over in a minute. Eight of us get to our feet. As many others didn’t. Some were slower than others getting up. It was like somebody had divided us into two groups, the living and the dead, and now we were seeing which pile of mud and bones and meat wound up on which side. Harding was up. I saw Polshanski lift himself up, surprised he was alive. I found myself looking at Sudul, I knew it was him, and I said let’s go, it’s time, but he’d gotten picked out for the other side, the dead ones. And that was that.”
“We’re almost done,” Harding said.
It was late, past two, and the neon boil down in Olongapo was simmering down. The ones who were destined to get drunk, get laid, get in fights, had accomplished this. They were tucked away, and now the night belonged to men who couldn’t sleep. The wee hours, the cool of the evening, when memories spanned the years the way radio transmissions bounced around the globe, odd songs from faraway places. Charley Camper returned from pissing. He brought more beer.
“I was thinking,” he said. “Right after the war, when folks want to know what you did, what you saw, you don’t want to talk about it. Years later, you’re ready to talk things over, no one wants to hear it. Am I right?”
“Yes,” Harding said.
“Then you come along,” Charley said. “And here we sit.”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m glad you made it,” Charley said. “You too, Griffin.”
“But you’re not done yet,” Harding cautioned.
“I know. But I will be in a minute. And then I can get back to worrying about my wife, the California condo woman, Ms. Century Twenty-one. And my California girls. Other night, one of them told me she thought she was ‘ready to go all the way.’ You believe it?”
“The older one?”
“Uh-uh. The younger.” Camper glanced from Harding to Griffin. He shrugged. He laughed. “A world of problems. You know something? I think it’s nice we talk about the dead. Like we were saving them from being forgotten. For a little while, anyway. It’s like a visit. Seeing ‘Mean’ Meade again. Sudul. Yeah . . .”
“And Polshanski,” Harding said. It sounded like a reminder. That’s how Camper took it.
“Yeah,” he said. “And Polshanski.
“Where the rice fields ended, the swamps began. I mean swamps. Ponds and bogs and reeds and rivers and islands. A wonderful place, what with leeches below your waist and mosquitoes up above. No way of knowing how long the swamps went on. All we could do was point toward the one place we knew that wasn’t swamp. That mountain. Arayat.
“We spent the night in the swamp. That was the worst night I ever had. The mosquitoes! They were everywhere, not just on your face and hands, but around your ears, like aircraft in a holding pattern, dozens of ‘em standing by while one or two came in strafing. I tried waving ‘em away. Then I waited for them to land, so I could swat ‘em. Then I waited for them to bite so I squashed them in my own blood. I was crying, I was so hurt and frustrated. Christ, with the Japs on our tails, you’d think we could meet them on solid ground at least, in uniforms that weren’t covered with mud. You’d think we could meet them without being bit and cut and feverish, on feet that weren’t swollen, with toenails falling out. Your life on the line and you smell like shit!
“At dawn we joined the navy. There was an old raft pulled up into the reeds, a dozen poles lashed together is all it was, enough for four men, and it only took an hour before we had made another just like it. We used belts and clothing to hold the contraption together. Then we set off in our armada. Where the water was shallow we pushed along with poles. In deeper water, going was tough. We didn’t have no proper oars, so we had to try paddling with our arms and legs, which I guess looked comical, except we were running for our lives. Oh, it was Huck Finn time for a while, weaving down those channels, high reeds on either side of us, birds spraying into the sky as we came near, fish jumping, we felt like explorers, like in the Everglades maybe, or the Sargasso Sea someplace. At the end we came upon an honest-to-God lake, a half mile across maybe, and on the other side was proper land, high and dry, with a couple of nipa huts around some fish ponds and, behind them, hills, all covered with trees and vines and creepers, and those hills were the bottom of the mountain we’d been aiming for, and it felt so close now we could kneel down and kiss its feet!
“All right. This is how
the story ends. We saw the shoreline. We whooped it up and waved and then we by God raced across the lake, poling until the water got too deep, poling and then paddling with our arms and legs, crying and splashing like kids at a swimming hole, but we didn’t have kids’ energy, not anymore. About halfway across we pulled up, gasping. I remember I lay back, panting for air, and there was water on my back, and overhead a range of blue sky and, right in front, that gorgeous hunk of mountain, with clouds covering the top. I heard my own breathing, the slap of water against the edge of the raft, right up against my ears, tickling, the screech of a bird that dive-bombed overhead, a white bird that wasn’t a plane, it was just a bird after a fish, a bird that maybe flew down from our mountain. And then: the sound of an engine, an engine in the water, a boat that was headed toward us, a boatload of Japs, and on the shoreline, out of the nipa huts, a bunch of white-uniformed Filipino cops. One if by land, two if by sea: either way they had us.
“I never felt worse in the whole war. You could take a beating. You could be proud of the beatings you took. You could stand losing a fight. Any fight that’s worth fighting is worth losing. What really hurt was looking foolish, small, silly. And sitting on that pile of wood, paddling with my damn hands, I never felt more ashamed unless it was the time my mom caught me playing with myself in the bathtub.
“Harding tells us to swim for the reeds. He said it was our only chance, losing ourselves in there. When I’m in the water, I look and Polshanski’s still on the raft, lying down.
“ ‘Come on, Polshanski,’ I say, and suddenly he’s got a shit-eating grin on his face, as though he’d put one over on us all, now he had the raft all to himself.
“ ‘Can’t swim,’ he says. And he’s raising his Springfield toward the Japs. And what I see next . . .”
