MacArthur's Ghost

by P. F. Kluge

  “Olivares, the police chief, had gotten away. The worst ones always do. Olmos went looking for him from room to room and when they were empty, he took it out on the building. Everything went out the window: books, chairs, tables, local records, court cases, debts, deaths, births. A real bonfire. I watched from down in the square. There were shot and beaten-to-death men still lying there, but everyone was merry, and I had a hard time with that, with all this celebration so soon after the dying. It bothered me. You couldn’t miss the looks on peoples’ faces. Juan Olmos had given them something they’d been waiting for, jubilee and judgment, revolution and kingdom come. And Eddie Richter wondered why I wasn’t more in the spirit of things.

  “ ‘You’re famous in this town, Mr. Harding,’ he said. ‘They’ll never forget you around here. Is it true you’re called MacArthur’s Ghost?’

  “ ‘Used to be,’ I said. ‘Now MacArthur’s back himself, who needs ghosts?’

  “Eddie Richter stared at me. He couldn’t figure it out. Then he stopped trying. It was no night for moping. They were starting history over here, he said. They’d erased the past, this was Day One. A hell of a thing, he thought, and he’d never seen anything like it. The guerrillas were great guys, Felipe Olmos had a very interesting mind, and that brother Juan was a real pistol. I was pretty hot stuff myself, because it took a special kind of American to win the trust and friendship these people were showing me.

  “ ‘If I were you, I wouldn’t be so quick to forget MacArthur’s Ghost,’ Eddie Richter, Jr., said. ‘The people in San Leandro sure won’t.’

  “We left at dawn and I could see Richter was right. People came up to me to shake my hand, mumble thanks. Some of them just wanted to touch me. I’d never felt so strange. Those looks and touches: it was like communion. They followed us out into the fields, a whole procession, and then, group by group, they peeled off and went to their farms. A little later, looking back from the foothills of Mount Arayat, I could see columns of dark smoke from half a dozen different places, and I asked if they were burning off the fields. I asked Juan Olmos. Yes, they were burning off the fields all right. They had torched their landlords’ houses. Eddie Richter, Jr., was right again. From this morning they were starting fresh.

  “Eddie Richter decided he’d like to hang around a while. Felipe Olmos welcomed him. They were both talkers. I wanted to go, just slip away and be alone. My old problem, the problem of the I, the we, the they had raised up again; it needed sorting out. But as you might guess, this was one time Juan Olmos noticed my departure. He followed me several hundred yards down the trail, past the last sentries. Even then he looked around to make sure no one was listening. He said thanks. Just that. He turned back up the trail before I could respond. Then he stopped and added something. ‘We’re not finished yet.’

  “ ‘I know,’ I said.

  “That was 1944. This is 1982. He was right, though. We’re not finished yet. Sorry, Griffin. The sun’s coming up and I have to go. I really have to go. Maybe I’ll see you in the mountains.”

  Part Eight

  CADILLAC BILL

  CHAPTER 37

  Cadillac Bill’s Hangar was a nightclub that copied and parodied the nearby air force base at Clark Field. On stage there were cavernous openings that were hangars, each with a dancer inside, but the women were aircraft, bombers, fighters, tankers, seaplanes, whirlybirds. The bars were laid out like ramps and runways, and the customers were targets, willing targets for the girls in the hangars who swung through the air on acrobatic parachutes, sometimes high overhead, sometimes within stroking distance of the crew cuts down below. “Make love and war” was the slogan of the place, and Cadillac Bill’s Hangar seemed to achieve a funny mixture of the two, a union that was also a reversal, because the women, the LBFM-PBR’s, Little Brown Fucking Machines Powered By Rice, were the ones out to search and destroy American boys, who hunkered behind San Miguel bottles like pioneers cowering behind a circle of Conestoga wagons.

  “Cadillac Bill?”

  “Yes, Mr. Griffin.”

  “You designed this place?”

  “Yes, sir. I did the best I could.”

  “I think you’re a genius.”

  “Sometimes I think, what if I could franchise places like this all across the U.S., in everybody’s hometown? I guess the country would never be the same.”

  “Is there someplace we can talk?”

  “Sure. Come on.” Cadillac Bill led Griffin back outside, onto the main street. “Gonna be a good night, I can feel it,” Cadillac Bill predicted. He glanced up and down, waving and nodding, pointing at his softball T-shirt and flashing a V-for-victory.

  “Christ I love it here. There’s no place like this. You really think the Filipinos ever gonna make us leave? Close the bases and pack up?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Not unless they can come with us when we leave,” Cadillac Bill said. “That’s what I think.”

  “They said the same thing in Havana, maybe,” Griffin suggested. “They had nightclubs there, you know, and wild parties, and guys who stood around saying how much they loved it.”

  “Don’t depress me, Mr. Griffin. I hate that kind of talk.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I hope it never comes to that. Anyway, I think old Uncle Sam learned a couple things since Cuba. Since Vietnam.”

  “And the Philippines gets the benefit of all that hard-earned wisdom? That it?”

  “I don’t know about that, Mr. Griffin. But I read a lot and I keep my ears open. And everything we say comes down to three little words. And it ain’t I love you. It’s keep the bases.”

  He unlocked a door that led into another part of the same building that housed all his other enterprises. WAR MUSEUM, the sign said.

  “Stay where you are till I hit the light,” Cadillac Bill warned. “You’re standing in a mine field.”

  He was right. As the lights came on, Griffin saw mines, and a tank, a jeep, a zero fighter. He saw rifles, bayonets, pistols, helmets, all set in a sort of diorama, as if an actual World War II battle had been arrested at its peak and preserved forever.

  “Now watch this,” Cadillac Bill called out. The place darkened but now you sensed that you were on a battlefield at night. There were all sorts of sounds: distant gunfire, overhead bombing, artillery and mortars and, from nearer by, movement, shouts, passwords, obscenities, screams, and moans. There were random blasts of light, explosions, lightning, searchlights, tracer bullets. There were smells, too, smells of the jungle after rain, of cordite, coffee, shit, and gasoline, and finally—where did he find such an essence and how did he keep it?—the sweet, sickening smell of death. Slowly, darkness faded into false dawn and then there was sunlight in the room, and it lit up the skeletons Cadillac Bill had arranged in one corner—uniformed, helmet-wearing skeletons with guns and flags.

  “How’d you like the show?” Cadillac Bill asked, motioning Griffin into an office that was also a sort of projection booth, a cluttered closet-size cubicle with newspapers, record jackets, and paper plates mulching on the floor, books and photos on the walls, and Cadillac Bill sitting on a pile of papers on his desk, the papers forming themselves around his ass, the way nests take the shape of animals that build them.

  “Museum cost me a mint, ain’t earned a cent,” he said. “A labor of love. Everything’s real. Skeletons included. I was hoping I could show this place to Colonel Harding.”

  “That’s all he needs,” Griffin said.

  “He is sort of standoffish, isn’t he? Not that he’s a snob exactly. A loner.”

  “He is that. And now he’s really alone.”

  “I heard about that. Got the army, navy and air force out looking for him. Thing I don’t understand is, who curtsied, who bowed? Was he looking for the NPA or what?”

  “I don’t know for sure what he’s after. I’m after him. I think I know where he was headed. He left a letter for me.”

  “Where’s he headed?”

  “Kiangen. The p
lace where the war ended. Yamashita’s surrender site. I thought you might be interested in going there with me.”

  “Sure, I’ll go with you,” Cadillac Bill said. “It sounds interesting. We’ll leave tonight. After the fish fights.”

  The fish fights.

  Griffin sat in Cadillac Bill’s office, lights out, peeking through a window at a small stage, carpeted with pink shag and flooded with orange light. Around the stage it was standing room only, elbow to brawny elbow, beer bottle to beer bottle. Then the woman appeared. She wasn’t the fine-featured Spanish type, like Cecilia Santos, or, for that matter, Imelda Marcos. This was an earthier beauty, Malaysian stock, brown-skinned, round and ample. Not for this woman the frivolities of go-go, or the spurious suspense of striptease. Naked as Eve, and as unashamed, she stepped to the very edge of the stage. The raucous crowd of flyboys hushed. The woman reached down for a bottle of baby oil—Johnson & Johnson’s—and proceeded to oil her body from head to toe, a gorgeous gleaming anointment. Griffin was squirming now; the office felt like a peep-show booth. After she oiled herself she paced about the stage a while, stretching luxuriously, yawning. Then she took an interest in the audience, an interest that was both critical and friendly. She studied one man, then another, and there was lots of elbowing and guffawing as her stare moved from subject to subject. Then it stopped: a cheer arose as a blond-haired California boy was pulled up onstage, which suddenly went dark.

  When the lights came up again the flyboy, naked, lay atop the woman, conventional missionary position, and from the way he bucked and moved, he’d clearly been admitted. “Hold on, Kevin,” someone shouted, and “Don’t lose it,” and “Ride ‘em, cowboy.” It sounded like a rodeo. Then it was show time and the woman, while retaining contact with her partner, was off the floor, on top, moving urgently, and then she was sideways, lying beside him, first one side then another, and Griffin remembered Charley Camper’s sexual-historical view of America and the Philippines, a man and a woman, changing positions but staying in touch, copulating forever.

  “How do you like the fish fights, Mr. Griffin?” Cadillac Bill entered the booth and stood beside him. “You get the idea, don’t you? She’s got more different positions than Baskin Robbins got flavors. Forty-two of them, and she never loses hold through all forty-two, and there’s never been a man who got to twenty without shooting off . . .”

  He glanced past Griffin toward the stage, where the flyboy was straddling the woman from behind, ordinarily a male-dominant position, but he was holding on for dear life because there was nothing formal or perfunctory about the woman. Each position was a new challenge in an act that went beyond pornography, beyond obscenity, beyond sex itself. It was the mechanical bull from Urban Cowboy, the boxing ring from Rocky, and the Russian roulette in The Deer Hunter. It was a living ritual.

  “. . . and I don’t believe we’ll see the record broke tonight.”

  Griffin couldn’t keep his eyes off the stage. The woman was astride the flyboy now, on top, only she was rotating like a helicopter, a human whirlybird, and her victim—for it was hard not to think of him as such—was in agony, face red, veins popping in his neck, eyes rolling backward in his head, clenched fists pounding the carpet like an about-to-be-pinned wrestler. “I think she’s got him!” Cadillac Bill said.

  And she did. Moving high and low, wheeling slowly and quickly: the center did not hold. The flyboy emitted a primal groan and his conqueror leapt off him in shocking haste, in time for everyone to see the American boy ejaculate on his thighs, and belly, and carpet. The woman looked down at her defeated not-quite mate. A saucy, contemptuous grin played on her face. Then she walked away. As the house lights came up and the crowd filed toward the exits, the wilting flyboy lay there, soiled and beaten.

  “That girl’s got a brother, went to the University of the Philippines for a while. Then he took off to the mountains for the revolution. What I think is that she’s the real revolutionary. She’s the one who puts it on the line. And she’s done more to fuck with the minds of the military than the NPA ever will. You ready now? The car’s outside.”

  “Whose side are you on?” Griffin wondered aloud.

  “There are no sides in the Philippines,” Cadillac Bill answered. “There’s only angles.”

  CHAPTER 38

  Sometimes history plays a game of spin the globe and randomly plants a finger on an obscure place, Appomattox Court House, say, and it all comes together for a day. Then the world rolls on. Such a place was General Yamashita’s surrender site, Kiangen, accustomed to receiving occasional visitors, puzzled about what to do with them. The two Americans found a store owner who accepted guests in front rooms on the second story of his home. The front porch had a view of the mountains where Harry Harding had gone. Now that he saw those mountains, Griffin thought it more and more unlikely that the old man would ever come out of them. Griffin and Cadillac walked to the far side of town, where there was a war memorial, an elaborate, ecumenical shrine financed by the promiscuously repentant Japanese, who had also speared the lawn with a thicket of smaller markers, flowers and papers deposited at their base.

  “Have you ever been here?” Griffin asked Cadillac Bill.

  “Nope,” he said. “I know the name though. I know all the names.”

  “Tell me about this place.”

  “How far back do you want me to go? Corregidor? Pearl Harbor? The Russo-Japanese War?”

  “Start with when MacArthur landed down on Leyte,” Griffin said. “That’s where Harding stopped.”

  “Stopped? He didn’t get no further than that?”

  “No,” Griffin admitted.

  “Sounds to me—I’m not a writer—but it sounds to me like you got a story with no ending.”

  “That’s what we’re waiting for, Cadillac. And while we wait . . .”

  “Okay. But if he don’t show up, you’re shit out of luck.”

  “He who defends everything defends nothing.” Frederick the Great said it. Cadillac Bill quoted it. General Tomoyuki Yamashita knew it. Arriving in the Philippines only weeks before MacArthur waded ashore at Leyte, Yamashita realized what MacArthur had failed to grasp two years before: that not all of the Philippines, not even all of Luzon, could be defended. In early 1945 he led his army into the mountains. At first, he aimed to hold airfields in the Cagayan Valley, denying them to the Americans, who were then attacking Okinawa. He wanted to retain the northern port of Aparri; he still hoped to be relieved. And he wished to hold Baguio as well: he liked the climate. Fate whittled away at these designs. Hard-pressed by Americans and guerrillas, Yamashita abandoned Baguio in April. At the same time he realized that Okinawa had been lost, so there was no point in holding onto airfields or ports. Running low on medical supplies and clothing, but still equipped with small arms and ample ammunition, Yamashita led sixty-five thousand troops into the mountainous area between Routes 4 and 11, a last-ditch redoubt that became known as the Kiangen Pocket. There he stayed, in the last phase of a rear-guard action that even his enemies acknowledged was successful and impressive. Though Kiangen itself was captured in July, the last weeks of the war saw some of the harshest mountain fighting yet; slow or no progress in wretched, rainy weather through the sort of terrain where a few men could hold off an army almost forever. In the last month of the war, the Americans advanced only three miles into the mountains beyond Kiangen. And then, on August 15, 1945, General Tomoyuki Yamashita surrendered. He walked out of the mountains, down the trail to Kiangen, into the arms of his enemies, his captors, judges, executioners. And Harry Roberts Harding, MacArthur’s Ghost, was at his side . . .

  During the week that followed in Kiangen, Griffin spent so much time looking at the mountains, he felt like one of those morbid tourists who used to sit on sunny Alpine terraces, pointing their binoculars at the North Wall of the Eiger to catch a glimpse of climbers scaling, or hanging from, the deadly peak.

  And as soon as he thought of that, something else came to mind: the realization that the
se mountains weren’t like the Alps and Rockies; they weren’t mountains at all, just higher piles of weeds and brush and trees. You could climb to the top and still not see the sky. And then Griffin came to with a start. Who said that? Whose voice intruded? Oh, yes, it was “Mean” Meade on Bataan, forty years ago. Another echo of an unfinished story. Which didn’t have an ending. Even Cadillac Bill knew that.

  “You’re shit out of luck.” That was Cadillac Bill’s opinion. Clifford Lerner put it differently. He’d said George wasn’t a writer, wasn’t a reporter. He was a stenographer. He wasn’t telling a story. He was being told—waiting to be told—one. Lerner was tough. He’d have done a week of homework before he sat down with Harding. He’d have books, Xeroxes, depositions. He’d check and cross-check. He’d interrupt a lot, circle around a touchy subject, double back to it, until he was satisfied. He’d know what it was about before he started—the themes, the mysteries, the questions and answers. He’d have the ending before he started. And he’d be busy, always busy, never waiting the way Griffin was waiting, waiting and wondering how much longer to wait.

  Cadillac Bill was busy too. He had Kiangen organized in no time, kids and old-timers scouring the mountains for war memorabilia that he could use in his museum. Anthropologist, historian, showman, and entrepreneur, he turned an ordinary day into an occasion and—by himself—restored to Kiangen a sense of its historic importance. The area around town had been pretty well “picked over,” Cadillac acknowledged: the Japanese were diligent about their fallen soldiers. So Cadillac and his people went farther and farther into the mountains, into “virgin territory,” searching for a camp or cave, a rumored hideout or headquarters. In midafternoon he came home, bruised, muddy, exhilarated, weighed down with the catch of the day: canteens, helmets, sake bottles, first-aid kits. Mortar shells. A light machine gun. A burlap sack of bones, two skulls. Every morning he went farther out and every afternoon he came back later, “picking the Kiangen Pocket.”